How to put dowloaded JSON data into variables in python

From https://docs.python.org/2/library/json.html :

json.loads(s[, encoding[, cls[, object_hook[, parse_float[, parse_int[, parse_constant[, object_pairs_hook[, **kw]]]]]]]])

Deserialize s (a str or unicode instance containing a JSON document) to a Python object using this conversion table.

If s is a str instance and is encoded with an ASCII based encoding other than UTF-8 (e.g. latin-1), then an appropriate encoding name must be specified. Encodings that are not ASCII based (such as UCS-2) are not allowed and should be decoded to unicode first.

The other arguments have the same meaning as in load().

If your JSON starts as an array at the outermost layer, it will be an array. If your JSON's outermost layer is an associative array, then please post your JSON and we can look into it a little further.

The problem is that json.loads() doesn't necessarily return a dictionary. If the outside container of the JSON is a list, then json.loads() will return a list, where the elements could be lists or dictionaries. Try iterating through the list returned by json.loads(). It's possible the dictionary you're looking for is simply json.loads()[0] or some other element.

There are 2 different types of JSON elements: nodes and arrays.

A node looks like:

node = {
    foo = 7
    bar = "Hello World!"
}

A array looks like this:

array = [ "one", "two", 3, 4, "5ive" ]

Your JSON element is probably a array. You can verify whether it's an array, dict, or other by using:

isinstance(json_element, dict)
isinstance(json_element, list)

Hope this helps!

There are some minor changes you should do:

1. Your API response is returning a list, so you have to iterate over it.

2. The requests library already supports converting to JSON so you don't have to worry about it.

   import requests
   
   
   # These our are demo API keys, you can use them!
   #location = ""
   api_key = 'simplyrets'
   api_secret = 'simplyrets'
   #api_url = 'https://api.simplyrets.com/properties?q=%s&limit=1' % (location)
   api_url = 'https://api.simplyrets.com/properties'
   
   response = requests.get(api_url, auth=(api_key, api_secret))
   response.raise_for_status()
   houseData = response.json()
   
   # different parameters we need to know
   for data in houseData:
       p = data['property']
       roof = p["roof"]
       cooling = p["cooling"]
       style = p["style"]
       area = p["area"]
       bathsFull = p["bathsFull"]
       bathsHalf = p["bathsHalf"]
   

If you want to make sure you will have only one result, do an if statement to check this.

if len(houseData) != 1:
    raise ValueError("Expecting only 1 houseData.")

data = houseData[0]
...