Question 110738 in Json Question posted in
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Python how to access specific json dictionary value by chaining the 'key'

If I have the following Json:

{
"a": {
       "b" : {
               "c" : "value"
             }
      }
}

This is loaded into my object (obj) via json.load()

Then I have another variable which is

path = "a.b.c"

To access the value of ‘c’ in the json, I would typically do:

obj["a"]["b"]["c"]

However I would like to leverage the ‘path’ variable, and do something like this:

obj[path]

Is this possible? How can this be achieved

Tags:

5

Answers


  1. 0

    You can split the path on dot and use reduce to get the nested value.

    from functools import reduce
d = {'a':{'b':{'c':'value'}}}
path = "a.b.c"
val = reduce(lambda o, k: o[k], path.split("."), d)
print(val)

    Demo

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  2. 0

    It’s possible to do so using a combination of operator.getitem and functools.reduce:

    >>> from functools import reduce
>>> from operator import getitem
>>> dct = {'a': {'b': {'c': 'value'}}}
>>> reduce(getitem, "a.b.c".split("."), dct)
'value'

    The way this works is that reduce will initially invoke getitem using dct and the first item from the "a.b.c".split() i.e "a" and then the result of it is then passed to getitem in next iteration but this time with "b" and so on…

    >>> getitem(dct, "a")
{'b': {'c': 'value'}}
>>> getitem(getitem(dct, "a"), "b")
{'c': 'value'}
>>> getitem(getitem(getitem(dct, "a"), "b"), "c")
'value'

    And getitem in itself works like:

    >>> getitem?
Signature: getitem(a, b, /)
Docstring: Same as a[b].
Type:      builtin_function_or_method
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  3. 0

    You could write a function that takes both the JSON data and the path as arguments. It can iterate through each key in the path (separated by .) and traverse through the JSON that way.

    def json_from_path(data: dict, path: str):
    for key in path.split('.'):
        data = data[key]
    return data
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  4. 0

    It’s a third-party installation, but the jq package lets you traverse data structures using the jq filter language.

    >>> import jq
>>> d = {"a": {"b": {"c": "value"}}}
>>> jq.compile(".a.b.c").input(d).first()
'value'

    (Note that . has to precede each key, rather than simply separating the keys, in the path.)

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  5. 0

    This might be a little beyond the scope of the question, but you can always subclass the dict type and overwrite the __getitem__ method to get the result you are looking for.

    This is the way that you could actually achieve the result the OP is asking for with the syntax used by the OP.

    For example:

    class Dict(dict):
    def __getitem__(self, val):
        try: return super().__getitem__(val)
        except KeyError:
            keys = val.split(".")
            value = super().__getitem__(keys[0])
            d = Dict(value)
            return d['.'.join(keys[1:])]

    Then it’s as simple as:

    path = 'a.b.c'
obj = Dict({"a": {"b" : {"c" : "value"}}})

result = obj[path]

print(result)

    OUTPUT

    value
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