JSON

Outputs, output formatting…this is a quite interesting topic during your development activities. Every time when you create a function you want to provide reusable code with excellent outputs…but how can you achieve this?

Maybe you feel this is a simple question and the answer is also simple. Nevertheless you realize some weeks later this is a little bit complex area. I mean when you choose a result type or solution you have some direction you can choose.

• True/False
• Simple string
• Nothing 🙁
• Result code (0, 1, …)
• JSON

My personal choice is JSON because easy to manage and you can provide several important information for re-usage via that . For example in Azure-Cli every time you receive JSON object which contains the most important information for current activity. Moreover a JSON object is easily managed by Python.

And now I show some useful example for JSON output management by Python.

0. Use JSON in python

JSON management is very simple in Python. You merely need to import JSON module.

# Import JSON module
import json

# Define JSON format string
mystring = '{"name": "Python", "version": "2.7"}'

# Convert string to JSON
myjson = json.loads(mystring)

# Use JSON data
print "{0}".format(myjson["name"])

1. Return from string

When you have a string in JSON format in your function and you would like to use it as a JSON object you need to convert the string to JSON.

# Define JSON format string
mystring = '{"name": "Python", "version": "2.7"}'    

# my Function
def myFunction(inputString):
    # Import JSON module
    import json

    # Try to convert to JSON
    try:
        # Convert string to JSON
        myjson = json.loads(inputString)
        
        # Return with result
        return myjson["name"]
    except:
        # Error handling
        return False


# Call function
myFunction(mystring)

To convert string to JSON object you can use the “json.loads()” method.

2. Return from JSON

Sometimes you have a JSON object and you would like to give back it via your function in string format.

# Define JSON format string
mystring = '{"name": "Python", "version": "2.7"}'    

# my Function
def myFunction(inputString):
    # Import JSON module
    import json

    # Try to convert to JSON
    try:
        # Convert string to JSON
        myjson = json.loads(inputString)
        
        # Return with result
        return json.dumps(myjson)
    except:
        # Error handling
        return False


# Call function
myFunction(mystring)

To convert JSON object to string you can use the “json.dumps()” method.

3. Return custom string

Finally you can create string output which is built by you.

# my Function
def myFunction(inputString):
     # Return with result
     return '{"status": "success", "message": "%s"}' % (inputString) 

# Call function
myFunction("This is a string")

Here you should not import json module to create JSON format output

Of course can combine them and use other formats…Let’s try them…