How do I get JSON data from RESTful service using Python?

Solution 1:

I would give the requests library a try for this. Essentially just a much easier to use wrapper around the standard library modules (i.e. urllib2, httplib2, etc.) you would use for the same thing. For example, to fetch json data from a url that requires basic authentication would look like this:

import requests

response = requests.get('http://thedataishere.com',
                         auth=('user', 'password'))
data = response.json()

For kerberos authentication the requests project has the reqests-kerberos library which provides a kerberos authentication class that you can use with requests:

import requests
from requests_kerberos import HTTPKerberosAuth

response = requests.get('http://thedataishere.com',
                         auth=HTTPKerberosAuth())
data = response.json()

Solution 2:

Something like this should work unless I'm missing the point:

import json
import urllib2
json.load(urllib2.urlopen("url"))

Solution 3:

You basically need to make a HTTP request to the service, and then parse the body of the response. I like to use httplib2 for it:

import httplib2 as http
import json

try:
    from urlparse import urlparse
except ImportError:
    from urllib.parse import urlparse

headers = {
    'Accept': 'application/json',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json; charset=UTF-8'
}

uri = 'http://yourservice.com'
path = '/path/to/resource/'

target = urlparse(uri+path)
method = 'GET'
body = ''

h = http.Http()

# If you need authentication some example:
if auth:
    h.add_credentials(auth.user, auth.password)

response, content = h.request(
        target.geturl(),
        method,
        body,
        headers)

# assume that content is a json reply
# parse content with the json module
data = json.loads(content)

Solution 4:

If you desire to use Python 3, you can use the following:

import json
import urllib.request
req = urllib.request.Request('url')
with urllib.request.urlopen(req) as response:
    result = json.loads(response.readall().decode('utf-8'))