Python parsing json from string

Question

I need to parse json from a partial string I get back from a web service. I have the following snippet of code which is working fine but is extremely ugly. Is there a better or cleaner way to do this?

x = '"1":{"name":"item one","code":"1"},"2":{"name":"item two","code":"2"},"3":{"name":"item three","code":"3"}'
split = x.split('},')
index = 0
for s in split:
 split[index] = '{' + s + '}}'
 index += 1
joined = ','.join(split)
joined = '[' + joined[:-1] + ']'
j = json.loads(joined)
print(j)

Here is the result:

[{'1': {'name': 'item one', 'code': '1'}},
 {'2': {'name': 'item two', 'code': '2'}},
 {'3': {'name': 'item three', 'code': '3'}}]

• JonSG: Can't you just do x = json.loads("{" + x + "}") then do whatever you like with it as a dict?
• Selcuk: @JonSG That won't produce the same expected output.
• wim: The first thing I would do is find out if the web service can be changed to return real JSON.
• JonSG: @Selcuk Yes, that is not a complete solution, but I see you were able to use it as the core of your solution which was my intention.

Answer 1

You can use the following snippet:

>>> [dict([t]) for t in json.loads(f"{{{x}}}").items()]
[{'1': {'name': 'item one', 'code': '1'}},
 {'2': {'name': 'item two', 'code': '2'}},
 {'3': {'name': 'item three', 'code': '3'}}]

Answer 2

You can fix the inconsistency by hand (add the missing braces) and use json module to parse:

data = json.loads('{' + x + '}')

Then you can convert the parsed data to the desired representation:

[{item[0]: item[1]} for item in data.items()]
#[{'1': {'name': 'item one', 'code': '1'}}, 
# {'2': {'name': 'item two', 'code': '2'}}, 
# {'3': {'name': 'item three', 'code': '3'}}]

Otherwise, you will end up implementing your own JSON parser, which is not trivial.