Substitution of different occurrences of a string with changing patterns

Question

I need to parse an invalid JSON string in which I find many repetitions of the same key, like the following snippet:

[...]
"term" : {"Entry" : "value1", [.. other data ..]},
"term" : {"Entry" : "value2", [.. other data ..]},
[...]

I thought of appending a suffix to each key, and I do it using the following code:

word = "term"
offending_string = '"term" : {"Entry"'
replacing_string_template = '"%s_d" : {"Entry"'
counter = 0
index = 0
while index != -1:
 # result is the string containing the JSON data
 index = result.find(offending_string, index)
 result = result.replace(offending_string,
 replacing_string_template % (word, counter), 1)
 counter += 1

It works, but I'd like to know if it is a good approach and if you would do this in a different way.

Answer 1

import json
def fixup(pairs):
 return pairs
decoded = json.loads(bad_json, object_pairs_hook = fixup)

object_pairs_hook is a more recent addition. If you have an older version of python you may not have it. The resulting python object will contain lists of pairs (including duplicates) rather then dictionaries.

• Andrea Spadaccini: +1 great! But I doubt it will work, because this code is deployed under Google App Engine, that uses an old version of python that doesn't even contain the json module. I have to import simplejson as json from django.
• Winston Ewert: @Andrea, the current version of simplejson does support the object_pairs_hook. Even if Google App Engine doesn't have the latest version, you can probably download and install your own copy of simplejson for your project.