Json KeyError with json.loads

Question

JSON seems to have hiccuped the following statements:

{"delete":{"status":{"id":12600579001,"user_id":55389449}}} 

code snippet:

 temp = json.loads(line) text = temp['text'] 

I get the following error output when the above code snippet encounters lines similar to the above JSON dictionary:

 text = temp['text'] KeyError: 'text' 

Is it because there is no "text" key in the line, or because "delete" is not in the dictionary?

Answer 1

Is it because there is no "text" key in the line, or because "delete" is not in the dictionary?

This is because there is no “text" key. If you print temp or check if the key 'text' in the resulting Python dictionary, you will notice that there is no key named 'text' . In fact, temp has only one key: 'delete' . The dictionary referenced by 'delete' contains one key 'status' , which contains another dictionary with two keys: 'user_id' and 'id' .

In other words, your structure is as follows:

 { "delete" : { "status" : { "id" : 12600579001, "user_id" : 55389449 } } } 

As you can see, there is no text key anywhere.

Alternatively, you can check it yourself:

 >>> 'text' in temp False >>> 'delete' in temp True 

Answer 2

This seems to be happening because the “text” is missing there. Perhaps you could use something like

 'text' in temp 

to check if "text" exists before trying to use it.

Edit:

I gave the example indicated in the comment and added an if / elif / else block to it.

 #! /usr/bin/python import sys import json f = open(sys.argv[1]) for line in f: j = json.loads(line) try: if 'text' in j: print 'TEXT: ', j['text'] elif 'delete' in j: print 'DELETE: ', j['delete'] else: print 'Everything: ', j except: print "EXCEPTION: ", j 

Example of fragment No. 1:

{u'favorited ': False, u'contributors': None, u'truncated ': False, u'text': ---- snip ----}

Example of fragment No. 2:

{u'delete ': {u'status': {u'user_id ': 55389449, u'id': 12600579001L}}}

Answer 3

From the published snippet, it seems that temp should have only one element with the key "delete" . You don't have the 'text' key, so I'm not sure what to look for temp['text'] .

Answer 4

Try this to see the problem in detail:

 import json line = '{"delete":{"status":{"id":12600579001,"user_id":55389449}}}' print 'line:', line temp = json.loads(line) print 'temp:', json.dumps(temp, indent=4) print 'keys in temp:', temp.keys() 

What generates this output:

 line: {"delete":{"status":{"id":12600579001,"user_id":55389449}}} temp: { "delete": { "status": { "user_id": 55389449, "id": 12600579001 } } } keys in temp: [u'delete'] 

The only key in temp dict is "delete". Thus temp['text'] throws a KeyError.

Answer 5

Why not put this between the first and second lines:

 print temp 

Answer 6

try to do it like this:

  temp = json.load(line) for lines in temp text = lines['text'] 

Answer 7

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. The heart of the problem was that Twitter json format has a dictionary in the dictionary. The solution includes a double index to get the variables that I need to check.

Answer 8

 #!/usr/bin/env python import sys import json from pprint import pprint json_file=sys.argv[1] json_data=open(json_file) j = json.load(json_data) def main(): for attribute_key in j['root_attribute']: try: print attribute_key['name'], attribute_key['status'], attribute_key['text'] except KeyError: pass if __name__ == "__main__": main()