Iterate through a JSON file using Python

Question

i am trying to loop through a simple json file (see link) and to calculate the sum of all integers from the file.

When iterating through the file I receive the following error: TypeError: string indices must be integers

Could you please help.

code below

import urllib.request, urllib.parse, urllib.error
import json
total=0
#url = input('Enter URL: ')
url= ' http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/comments_42.json'
uh=urllib.request.urlopen(url)
data = uh.read().decode()
print('Retrieved', len(data), 'characters')
print(data)

info = json.loads(data)
print('User count:', len(info)) #it displays "User count: 2" why?

for item in info:
    num=item["comments"][0]["count"]
    total=total+num
print (total)

I was able to extract the link you are mentioning from your code, but it is better to post a shortened (but representative) version the json file as text, possibly with a link to the full file. That's probably the reason that someone has downvoted your question. — Ronald
– Ronald, Commented Jul 8, 2020 at 9:59
To answer your question in the code, it displays 2 because the dictionary at the top level in your json file has two items: "notes" and "comments". — sevan
– sevan, Commented Jul 8, 2020 at 10:01

Ronald · Accepted Answer · 2020-07-08 09:55:53Z

1

The json file starts with a note. Your for-loop reads the keys of a dictionary, so the first item is 'note' (a string), which can only be subscripted with an integer, hence the error message.

You probably want to loop over info["comments"] which is the list with all dictionaries containing 'name' and 'count':

for item in info["comments"]:
    num=item["count"]
    total=total+num
print (total)

answered Jul 8, 2020 at 9:55

Ronald

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