[SOLVED] Parsing JSON like string in Python

Mark_667 · 11-09-2018, 06:51 AM

I'm trying to sanitise JSON like output before inserting into a list. For some reason the white space isn't even stripped out and commas and other artifacts are also inserted. Can anyone see why?

Code:

from subprocess import run, PIPE

output="""
[
    "Str1",
    "Str2"
]"""

output_string = output.strip()

bad_chars = '(){}<>[],\"'
for c in bad_chars: s = output_string.replace(c, "")
#https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3900054/python-strip-multiple-characters

results = list()
results.extend(output_string.split('\n'))

print(results)

dugan · 11-09-2018, 09:02 AM

This works:

Code:

from subprocess import run, PIPE

output="""
[
    "Str1",
    "Str2"
]"""

output_string = output.strip()

bad_chars = '(){}<>[]," '
for c in bad_chars:
    output_string = output_string.replace(c, "")
#https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3900054/python-strip-multiple-characters

results = list()
results.extend(s for s in output_string.split('\n') if s.strip())

print(results)

The first mistake was assigning the results of the replace method (which returns a new string) to "s".

That said, you said the string was only "JSON-like", but in you're code sample it's actually valid JSON. So the Pythonic approach would have been this:

Code:

import json

output="""
[
    "Str1",
    "Str2"
]"""

print(json.loads(output))

Mark_667 · 11-09-2018, 10:40 AM

Thanks, I didn't know you could just do that, looks like I'm just too old school!