Having trouble parsing some JSON in python

Question

I'm trying to parse some JSON data from https://mtgjson.com/json/AllCards.json but I'm not sure how to deal with the way its structured. Here's a snippet of my code:

cards = json.loads(open("AllCards.json", encoding="utf8").read())
for card in cards:
 print(card)

I was expecting "card" to be a dictionary that I could then use to access attributes, for example "card['name']". However all "card" is in this case is a string containing the the key value so I cant use it to access any of the nested attributes. If I print "cards" though, it outputs the entire JSON document including all of the nested attributes.

I also tried accessing them using cards[0] but this gave me a key error.

I'm obviously missing something here but I cant figure out what.

• Benoît P: try cards = json.load("AllCards.json") and for key, value in cards.items()

Answer 1

Iterating a dictionary will by default iterate its keys.

If you walso want the values, you should iterate dict.items() instead:

import json
cards = json.loads(open("AllCards.json", encoding="utf8").read())
for key, value in cards.items():
 print(key, value)

value will contain the sub-dict.

It's the same as

import json
cards = json.loads(open("AllCards.json", encoding="utf8").read())
for key in cards:
 print(key, cards[key])

If you don't care about the key, you can iterate the values directly:

import json
cards = json.loads(open("AllCards.json", encoding="utf8").read())
for card in cards.values():
 print(card)