Best way to model JSON data in python

Question

This question may be opinion based, but I figured I'd give it shot.

I am attempting to create a variety of classes which gets its values from JSON data. The JSON data is not under my control so I have to parse the data and select the values I want. My current implementation subclasses UserDict from python3's collection module. However, I have had iterations where I have directly created attributes and set the values to the parsed data.

The reason I changed to using the UserDict is the ease of using the update function.

However, I feel odd calling the object and using MyClass['attribute'] rather than MyClass.attribute

Is there a more pythonic way to model this data?

Thomas · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-23 03:08:17Z

1

I am not 100% convinced that this makes sense, but you could try this:

class MyClass (object):
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        for key in kwargs.keys():
            setattr(self, key, kwargs[key])

my_json = {"a":1, "b":2, "c":3}

my_instance = MyClass(**my_json)

print (my_instance.a)
# 1
print (my_instance.b)
# 2
print (my_instance.c)
# 3

--- edit

in case you have nested data you could also try this:

class MyClass (object):
     def __init__(self, **kwargs):
         for key in kwargs.keys():
              if isinstance(kwargs[key],dict):
                  setattr(self, key, MyClass(**kwargs[key]))
              else:
                  setattr(self, key, kwargs[key])

my_json = {"a":1, "b":2, "c":{"d":3}}

my_instance = MyClass(**my_json)

print (my_instance.a)
# 1
print (my_instance.b)
# 2
print (my_instance.c.d)
# 3

edited Feb 23, 2020 at 3:08

answered Feb 23, 2020 at 1:34

Thomas

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4 Comments

Thomas Over a year ago

For nested data it would return a dictionary. You could also create new classes for each nested object. See my edited answer above.

root Over a year ago

isinstance(kwargs[key],dict) still doesn't capture arrays, but this is going in a good direction. There's also the problem of checking the type of value (isinstance(myinstance.a, int)) - this could develop into an actual library.

Thomas Over a year ago

Yep, I think I stop here. You should get the point and can go from here. I am still not convinced that this all makes sense. If you don't know the structure of you json, why create a class? If schemas of different json objects differ, you would end up with two class instances with different interfaces.

DrSooch Over a year ago

Essentially I'm modeling sports data. I know what exact data I'm getting, it just has data that I don't need to hang on to. I just meant that I can't change the structure so I have to manually parse the JSON. Different classes hold different data. For example I have a class that models just a game's overall stats i.e. team names, score and that's it. I have another class that models the full statistics of a game.

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