Working With JSON Data in Python

JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format. It allows us to represent the objects in our Python programs as human-readable text that can be sent over the internet. Lots of APIs and databases use JSON for communication.

You’ll learn how to work with Python’s built-in json module to serialize the data in your programs into JSON format. Then, you’ll deserialize some JSON from an online API and convert it into Python objects.

What’s Included:

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About Austin Cepalia

Austin is a video tutorial author at Real Python. He graduated with a BS in CS from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2023, and now he writes software to support the semiconductor industry.

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Each tutorial at Real Python is created by a team of developers so that it meets our high quality standards. The team members who worked on this tutorial are:

Participant Comments

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PururinTora on March 2, 2022

This was awesome Guys! I learnt a lot from it. These lines were absolute highlights for me:

sorted_users = sorted(todos_by_user.items(), key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)
filtered_todos = list(filter(keep, todos))
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mikesult on Feb. 20, 2020

Great course, I really liked working with the custom type encoder/decoder. I usually type the exercises out by hand and I have been using single quotes instead of double quotes. One thing I learned was that JSON requires double quotes, single quotes don’t work. You might have mentioned that and I missed it (I think I read that somewhere and already had forgotten it). That made me fumble around for a while when I wrote out the complex_data.json using single quotes and JSON_Ex5.py didn’t work. Those are the kind of things that can trip me a bit. I appreciate learning about working with JSON. Thank you.

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Pygator on Aug. 27, 2019

Thanks. Great explanations! JSON has always been so mysterious.

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Fahim on July 9, 2019

Well explained. Thanks

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SamR on June 17, 2019

Very helpful course. Thanks!

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Raghunandana SK on April 1, 2019

Yep, This really takes some time to understand . But its explained well for sure

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ChrisF on March 31, 2019

Excellent course, really loved it

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James Magruder on March 30, 2019

This was excellent!! However, it will take me a while to absorb it all. I may have to watch it again.

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