Access dictionary with elements from array softcoded

Question

I have a dictionary created from JSON. I would like to access items in the dictionairy through arrays containing their keys. Visualised JSON:

{
  "name": "Chiel",
  "industry": {
    "IndustryName": "Computer Science",
    "company": {
      "companyName": "Apple",
      "address": {
        "streetName": "Apple Park Way",
        "streetNumber": "1"
      }
    }
  },
  "hobby": {
    "hobbyName": "Music production",
    "genre": {
      "genreName": "Deep house",
      "genreYearOrigin": "1980"
    }
  }
}

See the following code example:

#create dict
jsonData = '{"name":"Chiel","industry":{"IndustryName":"Computer Science","company":{"companyName":"Apple","address":{"streetName":"Apple Park Way","streetNumber":"1"}}},"hobby":{"hobbyName":"Music production","genre":{"genreName":"Deep house","genreYearOrigin":"1980"}}}'
dictionary = json.loads(jsonData)

#Referencing dict for 'streetName', from array, hardcoded.    
companyElements = ["industry", "company", "address", "streetName"]
print(dictionary[companyElements[0]][companyElements[1]][companyElements[2]][companyElements[3]])

#Referencing dict for 'genreName', from array, hardcoded.    
hobbyElements = ["hobby", "genre", "genreName"]
print(dictionary[hobbyElements[0]][hobbyElements[1]][hobbyElements[2]])

The problem is that accessing the dictionaries is being done hardcoded. In other words, there are numbers being used (0, 1, 2, 3).

Is it possible to access the dictionairy through an array, but soft coded? So passing in an array (or another data structure) to the dict without making use of numbers? If so, how can one achieve this?

Answer 1

A possible solution is (from the example you provided):

def get_element(dictionary, array):
   x = dictionary.copy()
   for i in array:
      x = x[i]
   return x

companyElements = ["industry", "company", "address", "streetName"]
hobbyElements = ["hobby", "genre", "genreName"]

print(get_element(dictionary, companyElements))
print(get_element(dictionary, hobbyElements))

Answer 2

You could write a function that iterates the given keys.

Beware that the following implementation will not catch exceptions if one or more keys are missing in your JSON:

import json
import copy
#create dict
jsonData = '{"name":"Chiel","industry":{"IndustryName":"Computer Science","company":{"companyName":"Apple","address":{"streetName":"Apple Park Way","streetNumber":"1"}}},"hobby":{"hobbyName":"Music production","genre":{"genreName":"Deep house","genreYearOrigin":"1980"}}}'
dictionary = json.loads(jsonData)

#Referencing dict for 'streetName', from array, hardcoded.
companyElements = ["industry", "company", "address", "streetName"]

#Referencing dict for 'genreName', from array, hardcoded.
hobbyElements = ["hobby", "genre", "genreName"]

def get_dict_value(data, keys):
    result = copy.deepcopy(data)
    for key in keys:
        result = result[key]
    return result

print( get_dict_value(dictionary, companyElements) )
print( get_dict_value(dictionary, hobbyElements) )

Result:

Apple Park Way
Deep house

Answer 3

You can use pandas library . It handles file operations very efficiently in Python because it's written in C. You could use json_normalize function in Pandas for this task .

Reference - https://www.kaggle.com/jboysen/quick-tutorial-flatten-nested-json-in-pandas

import json
file=open('kk.json')
inp=json.load(file)
print(json_normalize(inp))