The fastest way to structure data in JSON for python

Question

I have a complex document that I am trying to structure most conveniently and efficiently with JSON in Python. I would like to be able to retrieve one of the items in my document with one line (i.e. not via a for loop)

A demo of the structure looks like this:

{
    "movies": {
        "0": {
            "name": "charles",
            "id": 0, 
            "loopable": true
        },
        "1": {
            "name": "ray",
            "id": 1, 
            "loopable": true
        }
    }
}

I am trying to be able to easily fetch a movie based on its id field. To do this, right now, I have made the index the same as the key to the movies object. So when I json.load the object to find movie 1's name I can just do movie[(id)]['name']

It seems like I should have a list of movies in the json file but it also seems like that would be more complicated. It could look like this:

{
    "movies": [
        {
            "name": "charles",
            "id": 0, 
            "loopable": true
        },
        {
            "name": "ray",
            "id": 1, 
            "loopable": true
        }
    ]
}

but if that were the case I would have to loop through the entire array like this:

for movie in movies:
    if movie['id'] == (id)
        # Now I can get movie['id']['name']

Is there a more effiecient way of doing this?

If you don't want to have the movie ID be the key, you might be better off using a database like pythons built-in SQLite support. — rlbond
– rlbond, Commented Jul 6, 2015 at 21:54
So is the issue that you don't know how to cast the value of id from an integer to a string? I don't see why you can't use your original structure. — Charles Duffy
– Charles Duffy, Commented Jul 6, 2015 at 22:23

fferri · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-06 22:08:25Z

3

Let 'movies' be a dict and not a list:

{
    "movies": {
        "12": {
            "name": "charles",
            "id": 12, 
            "loopable": true
        },
        "39": {
            "name": "ray",
            "id": 39, 
            "loopable": true
        }
    }
}

and you can access movie by id with yourjson['movies'][str(id)]

edited Jul 6, 2015 at 22:08

answered Jul 6, 2015 at 21:56

fferri

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1 Comment

Startec Over a year ago

I would like to do that (as you can see in my example) but numerical strings are not valid json

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