JSON to pandas DataFrame

You could first import your json data in a Python dictionnary :

data = json.loads(elevations)

Then modify data on the fly :

for result in data['results']:
    result[u'lat']=result[u'location'][u'lat']
    result[u'lng']=result[u'location'][u'lng']
    del result[u'location']

Rebuild json string :

elevations = json.dumps(data)

Finally :

pd.read_json(elevations)

You can, also, probably avoid to dump data back to a string, I assume Panda can directly create a DataFrame from a dictionnary (I haven’t used it since a long time :p)

The problem is that you have several columns in the data frame that contain dicts with smaller dicts inside them. Useful Json is often heavily nested. I have been writing small functions that pull the info I want out into a new column. That way I have it in the format that I want to use.

for row in range(len(data)):
    #First I load the dict (one at a time)
    n = data.loc[row,'dict_column']
    #Now I make a new column that pulls out the data that I want.
    data.loc[row,'new_column'] = n.get('key')

Check this snip out.

# reading the JSON data using json.load()
file = 'data.json'
with open(file) as train_file:
    dict_train = json.load(train_file)

# converting json dataset from dictionary to dataframe
train = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(dict_train, orient='index')
train.reset_index(level=0, inplace=True)

Hope it helps 🙂

billmanH’s solution helped me but didn’t work until i switched from:

n = data.loc[row,'json_column']

to:

n = data.iloc[[row]]['json_column']

here’s the rest of it, converting to a dictionary is helpful for working with json data.

import json

for row in range(len(data)):
    n = data.iloc[[row]]['json_column'].item()
    jsonDict = json.loads(n)
    if ('mykey' in jsonDict):
        display(jsonDict['mykey'])

Just a new version of the accepted answer, as python3.x does not support urllib2

from requests import request
import json
from pandas.io.json import json_normalize

path1 = '42.974049,-81.205203|42.974298,-81.195755'
response=request(url='http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/elevation/json?locations='+path1+'&sensor=false', method='get')
elevations = response.json()
elevations
data = json.loads(elevations)
json_normalize(data['results'])

#Use the small trick to make the data json interpret-able
#Since your data is not directly interpreted by json.loads()

>>> import json
>>> f=open("sampledata.txt","r+")
>>> data = f.read()
>>> for x in data.split("n"):
...     strlist = "["+x+"]"
...     datalist=json.loads(strlist)
...     for y in datalist:
...             print(type(y))
...             print(y)
...
...
<type 'dict'>
{u'0': [[10.8, 36.0], {u'10': 0, u'1': 0, u'0': 0, u'3': 0, u'2': 0, u'5': 0, u'4': 0, u'7': 0, u'6': 0, u'9': 0, u'8': 0}]}
<type 'dict'>
{u'1': [[10.8, 36.1], {u'10': 0, u'1': 0, u'0': 0, u'3': 0, u'2': 0, u'5': 0, u'4': 0, u'7': 0, u'6': 0, u'9': 0, u'8': 0}]}
<type 'dict'>
{u'2': [[10.8, 36.2], {u'10': 0, u'1': 0, u'0': 0, u'3': 0, u'2': 0, u'5': 0, u'4': 0, u'7': 0, u'6': 0, u'9': 0, u'8': 0}]}
<type 'dict'>
{u'3': [[10.8, 36.300000000000004], {u'10': 0, u'1': 0, u'0': 0, u'3': 0, u'2': 0, u'5': 0, u'4': 0, u'7': 0, u'6': 0, u'9': 0, u'8': 0}]}
<type 'dict'>
{u'4': [[10.8, 36.4], {u'10': 0, u'1': 0, u'0': 0, u'3': 0, u'2': 0, u'5': 0, u'4': 0, u'7': 0, u'6': 0, u'9': 0, u'8': 0}]}
<type 'dict'>
{u'5': [[10.8, 36.5], {u'10': 0, u'1': 0, u'0': 0, u'3': 0, u'2': 0, u'5': 0, u'4': 0, u'7': 0, u'6': 0, u'9': 0, u'8': 0}]}
<type 'dict'>
{u'6': [[10.8, 36.6], {u'10': 0, u'1': 0, u'0': 0, u'3': 0, u'2': 0, u'5': 0, u'4': 0, u'7': 0, u'6': 0, u'9': 0, u'8': 0}]}
<type 'dict'>
{u'7': [[10.8, 36.7], {u'10': 0, u'1': 0, u'0': 0, u'3': 0, u'2': 0, u'5': 0, u'4': 0, u'7': 0, u'6': 0, u'9': 0, u'8': 0}]}
<type 'dict'>
{u'8': [[10.8, 36.800000000000004], {u'1': 0, u'0': 0, u'3': 0, u'2': 0, u'5': 0, u'4': 0, u'7': 0, u'6': 0, u'9': 0, u'8': 0}]}
<type 'dict'>
{u'9': [[10.8, 36.9], {u'1': 0, u'0': 0, u'3': 0, u'2': 0, u'5': 0, u'4': 0, u'7': 0, u'6': 0, u'9': 0, u'8': 0}]}

Here is small utility class that converts JSON to DataFrame and back: Hope you find this helpful.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from pandas.io.json import json_normalize

class DFConverter:

    #Converts the input JSON to a DataFrame
    def convertToDF(self,dfJSON):
        return(json_normalize(dfJSON))

    #Converts the input DataFrame to JSON 
    def convertToJSON(self, df):
        resultJSON = df.to_json(orient='records')
        return(resultJSON)

Once you have the flattened DataFrame obtained by the accepted answer, you can make the columns a MultiIndex (“fancy multiline header”) like this:

df.columns = pd.MultiIndex.from_tuples([tuple(c.split('.')) for c in df.columns])

Optimization of the accepted answer:

The accepted answer has some functioning problems, so I want to share my code that does not rely on urllib2:

import requests
from pandas import json_normalize
url = 'https://www.energidataservice.dk/proxy/api/datastore_search?resource_id=nordpoolmarket&limit=5'

response = requests.get(url)
dictr = response.json()
recs = dictr['result']['records']
df = json_normalize(recs)
print(df)

Output:

        _id                    HourUTC               HourDK  ... ElbasAveragePriceEUR  ElbasMaxPriceEUR  ElbasMinPriceEUR
0    264028  2019-01-01T00:00:00+00:00  2019-01-01T01:00:00  ...                  NaN               NaN               NaN
1    138428  2017-09-03T15:00:00+00:00  2017-09-03T17:00:00  ...                33.28              33.4              32.0
2    138429  2017-09-03T16:00:00+00:00  2017-09-03T18:00:00  ...                35.20              35.7              34.9
3    138430  2017-09-03T17:00:00+00:00  2017-09-03T19:00:00  ...                37.50              37.8              37.3
4    138431  2017-09-03T18:00:00+00:00  2017-09-03T20:00:00  ...                39.65              42.9              35.3
..      ...                        ...                  ...  ...                  ...               ...               ...
995  139290  2017-10-09T13:00:00+00:00  2017-10-09T15:00:00  ...                38.40              38.4              38.4
996  139291  2017-10-09T14:00:00+00:00  2017-10-09T16:00:00  ...                41.90              44.3              33.9
997  139292  2017-10-09T15:00:00+00:00  2017-10-09T17:00:00  ...                46.26              49.5              41.4
998  139293  2017-10-09T16:00:00+00:00  2017-10-09T18:00:00  ...                56.22              58.5              49.1
999  139294  2017-10-09T17:00:00+00:00  2017-10-09T19:00:00  ...                56.71              65.4              42.2 

PS: API is for Danish electricity prices

I prefer a more generic method in which may be user doesn’t prefer to give key ‘results’. You can still flatten it by using a recursive approach of finding key having nested data or if you have key but your JSON is very nested. It is something like:

from pandas import json_normalize

def findnestedlist(js):
    for i in js.keys():
        if isinstance(js[i],list):
            return js[i]
    for v in js.values():
        if isinstance(v,dict):
            return check_list(v)


def recursive_lookup(k, d):
    if k in d:
        return d[k]
    for v in d.values():
        if isinstance(v, dict):
            return recursive_lookup(k, v)
    return None

def flat_json(content,key):
    nested_list = []
    js = json.loads(content)
    if key is None or key == '':
        nested_list = findnestedlist(js)
    else:
        nested_list = recursive_lookup(key, js)
    return json_normalize(nested_list,sep="_")

key = "results" # If you don't have it, give it None

csv_data = flat_json(your_json_string,root_key)
print(csv_data)

Rumble supports JSON natively with JSONiq and runs on Spark, managing DataFrames internally so you don’t need to — even if the data isn’t fully structured:

let $coords := "42.974049,-81.205203%7C42.974298,-81.195755"
let $request := json-doc("http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/elevation/json?locations="||$coords||"&sensor=false")
for $obj in $request.results[]
return {
  "latitude" : $obj.location.lat,
  "longitude" : $obj.location.lng,
  "elevation" : $obj.elevation
}

The results can be exported to CSV and then reopened in any other host language as a DataFrame.

use Json to load the file and convert it to a pandas dataframe using DataFrame.from_dict function

import json
import pandas as pd
json_string = '{ "name":"John", "age":30, "car":"None" }'

a_json = json.loads(json_string)
print(a_json)

dataframe = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(a_json)

Refer MongoDB documentation, I got the following code:

from pandas import DataFrame
df = DataFrame('Your json string')