Question

I have the following JSON in my view (simplified for this example):

video = 
     {
     'label': 'hd',
     'url': 'google',
     'format': 'mp4',
     'video_codec': 'h264',
     'audio_codec': 'aac',
     'size': '1080x720',
     }

And I can call a function like so: do_something(video)

However, when I try and extract this JSON into an external file, as follows —

file=open('data.json')
video=file.read()

I get an error, which appears to be related to having newlines and excessive spaces in the file. How would I 1) format the above json document to put it into an external file; and 2) how would I import it so I can use it with a function? Thank you.

Answer 1

It’s easy once you have actual JSON, preferably from json.dump().

$ cat t.json
{
  "label": "hd",
  "url": "google",
  "format": "mp4",
  "video_codec": "h264",
  "audio_codec": "aac",
  "size": "1080x720"
}
$ python << EOF
> import json
> f = open('t.json')
> print json.load(f)
> f.close()
> EOF
{u'format': u'mp4', u'url': u'google', u'label': u'hd', u'audio_codec': u'aac', u'video_codec': u'h264', u'size': u'1080x720'}