4 Great Python functions to handle JSON data super easily

JSON is a format to structure data. It is widely used to store and send data. In this article I will show you how to use 4 Python functions to work with JSON. The functions are part of the built-in Python package: json.

The functions that we will discuss are:

1. load, a function that can be used to transform a JSON file into a Python dictionary.
2. loads, a function that can be used to transform a JSON string into a Python dictionary.
3. dump, a function that can be used to transform a Python dictionary into a JSON file.
4. dumps, a function that can be used to transform a Python dictionary into a JSON string.

Python dictionaries and JSON

As you might have noticed all functions work with Python dictionaries. That is because the Python datatype dictionary is very similar to JSON objects. First of all, both datatypes consist of key-value pairs. Each key-value pair has one key and one value. The key and value are separated by a colon-symbol (:) in both a dictionary and JSON. And both datatypes begin and end with curly brackets ({}).

But the similar structure is the most important, since this makes it easy to transform data from one datatype to another.

Using the json package in Python