Nested JSON Structures

Navigate and extract values from deeply nested JSON data

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Nested JSON

Real-world JSON is rarely flat. API responses often have objects nested inside objects, with arrays containing more objects.

{
  "data": {
    "user": {
      "name": "Alice"
    },
    "items": [
      {"id": 1, "product": "Laptop"}
    ]
  }
}

Navigating nested structures

Chain dictionary lookups with [] to reach nested values. Each [] goes one level deeper.

response["data"]["user"]["name"]     # → "Alice"
response["data"]["items"][0]["product"]  # → "Laptop"

Read left to right: start at response, go into "data", then "user", then "name".

Accessing list items in nested JSON

Use a numeric index to access a specific item in a nested list.

items = response["data"]["items"]
print(len(items))          # number of items
print(items[0]["product"]) # first item's product

Instructions

Extract values from a nested API response.

Import json.
Open api_response.json in read mode. Assign json.load(file) to response.
Assign response["data"]["user"]["name"] to user_name. Call print(user_name).
Assign response["data"]["items"][0]["product"] to first_item. Call print(first_item).
Call print(len(response["data"]["items"])) to print the total number of items.

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# api_response.json contains:
# {
#   "status": "ok",
#   "data": {
#     "user": {"name": "Alice", "email": "alice@example.com"},
#     "items": [
#       {"id": 1, "product": "Laptop", "price": 999.99},
#       {"id": 2, "product": "Mouse", "price": 29.99}
#     ]
#   }
# }

# Step 1: Import json

# Step 2: Open api_response.json and load it into response

# Step 3: Extract the user's name and print it
# Step 4: Extract the first item's product name and print it
# Step 5: Print the total number of items

Nested JSON Structures

Nested JSON

Navigating nested structures

Accessing list items in nested JSON

Instructions

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