How to remove whitespaces and newlines from every value in a JSON file?
Solution 1:
Now I want to strip off all he whitespaces and newlines for every value in the JSON file
Using pkgutil.simplegeneric()
to create a helper function get_items()
:
import json
import sys
from pkgutil import simplegeneric
@simplegeneric
def get_items(obj):
while False: # no items, a scalar object
yield None
@get_items.register(dict)
def _(obj):
return obj.items() # json object. Edit: iteritems() was removed in Python 3
@get_items.register(list)
def _(obj):
return enumerate(obj) # json array
def strip_whitespace(json_data):
for key, value in get_items(json_data):
if hasattr(value, 'strip'): # json string
json_data[key] = value.strip()
else:
strip_whitespace(value) # recursive call
data = json.load(sys.stdin) # read json data from standard input
strip_whitespace(data)
json.dump(data, sys.stdout, indent=2)
Note: functools.singledispatch()
function (Python 3.4+) would allow to use collections
' MutableMapping/MutableSequence
instead of dict/list
here.
Output
{
"anotherName": [
{
"anArray": [
{
"anotherKey": "value",
"key": "value"
},
{
"anotherKey": "value",
"key": "value"
}
]
}
],
"name": [
{
"someKey": "some Value"
},
{
"someKey": "another value"
}
]
}
Solution 2:
Parse the file using JSON:
import json
file = file.replace('\n', '') # do your cleanup here
data = json.loads(file)
then walk through the resulting data structure.
Solution 3:
This may not be the most efficient process, but it works. I copied that sample into a file named json.txt
, then read it, deserialized it with json.loads()
, and used a pair of functions to recursively clean it and everything inside it.
import json
def clean_dict(d):
for key, value in d.iteritems():
if isinstance(value, list):
clean_list(value)
elif isinstance(value, dict):
clean_dict(value)
else:
newvalue = value.strip()
d[key] = newvalue
def clean_list(l):
for index, item in enumerate(l):
if isinstance(item, dict):
clean_dict(item)
elif isinstance(item, list):
clean_list(item)
else:
l[index] = item.strip()
# Read the file and send it to the dict cleaner
with open("json.txt") as f:
data = json.load(f)
print "before..."
print data, "\n"
clean_dict(data)
print "after..."
print data
The result...
before...
{u'anotherName': [{u'anArray': [{u'anotherKey': u' value', u'key': u' value\n\n'}, {u'anotherKey': u'value', u'key': u' value\n'}]}], u'name': [{u'someKey': u'\n\n some Value '}, {u'someKey': u'another value '}]}
after...
{u'anotherName': [{u'anArray': [{u'anotherKey': u'value', u'key': u'value'}, {u'anotherKey': u'value', u'key': u'value'}]}], u'name': [{u'someKey': u'some Value'}, {u'someKey': u'another value'}]}