Practical Data Analysis Cookbook

Reading and writing JSON files with Python

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It is a hierarchical dictionary-like structure that stores key-value pairs separated by a comma; the key-value pairs are separated by a colon ':'. JSON is platform-independent (like XML, which we will cover in the Reading and writing XML files with Python recipe) making sharing data between platforms very easy. You can read more about JSON at http://www.w3schools.com/json/.

Getting ready

To execute this recipe, you will need Python with the pandas module installed. No other prerequisites are required.

How to do it…

The code to read a JSON file is as follows. Note that we assume the pandas module is already imported and aliased as pd (the read_json.py file):

# name ...