How To Escape Characters When Reading JSON

Question

I need to write out all the variables in this JSON response:

  "result": {
    "\/common\/topic\/weblink": [
      {
        "url": "http:\/\/www.boardgamegeek.com\/boardgame\/13", 
        "description": "BoardGameGeek"
      }
    ], 
    "id": "\/en\/settlers_of_catan"
  }

So to get the id:

result.id

But how do I get the values for "\/common\/topic\/weblink"?

Answer 1

You want something like

result["\/common\/topic\/weblink"][0].url

(I think)

Answer 2

"\/common\/topic\/weblink" resolves to the string /common/topic/weblink. Any API accessing the decoded content should use the resulting unescaped data; the escaping is just part of JSON's encoding.

This works fine, using the standard JSON module included in Python, which I strongly recommend you use rather than third-party ones unless you have a very strong reason to be different:

import json

json_data = r"""
{
  "result": {
    "\/common\/topic\/weblink": [
      {
        "url": "http:\/\/www.boardgamegeek.com\/boardgame\/13",
        "description": "BoardGameGeek"
      }
    ],
    "id": "\/en\/settlers_of_catan"
  }
}"""

data = json.loads(json_data)
print data["result"]["/common/topic/weblink"]

Note that you left out the enclosing braces on the object, which I added in.

Answer 3

Try

result.__getattribute__("\/common\/topic\/weblink")[0].url