Intro to Python for Computer Science and Data Science: Learning to Program with AI, Big Data and The Cloud

13.5 What’s in a Tweet?

The Twitter API methods return JSON objects. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a text-based data-interchange format used to represent objects as collections of name–value pairs. It’s commonly used when invoking web services. JSON is both a human-readable and computer-readable format that makes data easy to send and receive across the Internet.

JSON objects are similar to Python dictionaries. Each JSON object contains a list of property names and values, in the following curly braced format:

{propertyName1: value1, propertyName2: value2}

As in Python, JSON lists are comma-separated values in square brackets:

[value1, value2, value3]

For your convenience, Tweepy handles the JSON for you behind the scenes, converting ...