Convert JSON array to Python list

Question

import json

array = '{"fruits": ["apple", "banana", "orange"]}'
data  = json.loads(array)

That is my JSON array, but I would want to convert all the values in the fruits string to a Python list. What would be the correct way of doing this?

Answer 1

import json

array = '{"fruits": ["apple", "banana", "orange"]}'
data  = json.loads(array)
print data['fruits']
# the print displays:
# [u'apple', u'banana', u'orange']

You had everything you needed. data will be a dict, and data['fruits'] will be a list

Answer 2

Tested on Ideone.

import json
array = '{"fruits": ["apple", "banana", "orange"]}'
data  = json.loads(array)
fruits_list = data['fruits']
print fruits_list

Answer 3

data will return you a string representation of a list, but it is actually still a string. Just check the type of data with type(data). That means if you try using indexing on this string representation of a list as such data['fruits'][0], it will return you "[" as it is the first character of data['fruits']

You can do json.loads(data['fruits']) to convert it back to a Python list so that you can interact with regular list indexing. There are 2 other ways you can convert it back to a Python list suggested here