Parsing and Creating JSON

Python's json module has two main functions: loads() parses JSON into Python, dumps() converts Python to JSON.

import json

# Parse JSON string into Python dict
json_string = '{"name": "Alice", "age": 30}'
data = json.loads(json_string)
print(data["name"])  # Alice

Going the other direction:

# Convert Python dict to JSON string
data = {"name": "Alice", "age": 30}
json_string = json.dumps(data)
print(json_string)  # '{"name": "Alice", "age": 30}'

The "s" in loads/dumps stands for "string." These work with text.

For files, use load() and dump() (without the "s"):

# Read from file
with open("data.json") as f:
    data = json.load(f)

# Write to file
with open("data.json", "w") as f:
    json.dump(data, f)

I explain these patterns in my JSON with Python course.