Get JSON

json is a module that helps us use the JSON data format.



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import json

requests is a third-party module for interacting with the Internet



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import requests

Set the URL of the data, which we've mirrored here on S3: https://s3.amazonaws.com/nicar17/pycar17/bill_track.json (You can find the original data here)



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url = 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/nicar17/pycar17/bill_track.json'

Read the requests documentation for information. I promise it isn't that scary. http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/quickstart/#json-response-content

Request the data



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r = requests.get(url)

Since we know our data will be JSON, let's automatically convert it to a Python dict.



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data = r.json()

-- OR --

If the network is down, we can use a local version of this file.

with open('bills.json', 'r') as f:
    data = json.load(f)

json.dumps() is a way to print a Python dict in a more human-readable way.



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print(json.dumps(data, indent=4))