Question

I am new to python and django.

For my application in my django view, I am accepting array (and sub arrays) of JSON objects as request, by using json.loads I am trying to parse and iterate thru JSON objects but facing issues while parsing.

my javascript object sent from client is

var JSONObject = { 
       "employees_companyA": 
        [
          { "firstName":"John" , "lastName":"Doe" }, 
          { "firstName":"Anna" , "lastName":"Smith" }, 
          { "firstName":"Peter" , "lastName":"Jones" }
        ],

      "employees_companyB": 
        [
          { "firstName":"John" , "lastName":"Doe" }, 
          { "firstName":"Anna" , "lastName":"Smith" }, 
          { "firstName":"Peter" , "lastName":"Jones" }
        ]
     };

What is the best way to parse above two objects and read firstName, lastName for same.

I tried using o[“firstName”], o.firstName etc (below is my code snippet)

   json_obj = json.loads(request.POST['json_test']) 
   for o in json_obj:
        temp_arr.append(o["firstName"])

I am sure this would be pretty straightforward but I couldn’t find exact help here.

Answer 1

The top-level element of your JSON structure is not a list, but a mapping. It’s keys are of the form "employees_companyA", "employees_companyB", etc.

You need to thus address that structure using the python mapping interface instead:

for value in json_obj.itervalues():
     temp_arr.append(value[0]["firstName"])

or as a one-liner:

temp_arr = [value[0]['firstName'] for value in json_obj.itervalues()]

Both use the .itervalues() method on json_obj to loop over all the values in the structure.