Reading and Writing JSON to a File in Python

Reading and Writing JSON to a File in Python

Writing JSON to a File

The easiest way to write your data in the JSON format to a file using Python is to use store your data in a dict object, which can contain other nested dicts, arrays, booleans, or other primitive types like integers and strings. You can find a more detailed list of data types supported here.

The built-in json package has the magic code that transforms your Python dict object in to the serialized JSON string.

import json

data = {}
data['people'] = []
data['people'].append({
    'name': 'Scott',
    'website': 'stackabuse.com',
    'from': 'Nebraska'
})
data['people'].append({
    'name': 'Larry',
    'website': 'google.com',
    'from': 'Michigan'
})
data['people'].append({
    'name': 'Tim',
    'website': 'apple.com',
    'from': 'Alabama'
})

with open('data.txt', 'w') as outfile:
    json.dump(data, outfile)

Reading JSON from a File

On the other end, reading JSON data from a file is just as easy as writing it to a file. Using the same json package again, we can extract and parse the JSON string directly from a file object. In the following example, we do just that and then print out the data we got:

import json

with open('data.txt') as json_file:
    data = json.load(json_file)
    for p in data['people']:
        print('Name: ' + p['name'])
        print('Website: ' + p['website'])
        print('From: ' + p['from'])
        print('')