Extract/scrape specific data from JSON file

This been bugging me for quite a few hours. I've been searching a lot and I have found a lot of information. The problem is, I'm not that good, I'm actually a beginner to the max. I'd like to achieve this with Python (if it's possible!). Maybe with JavaScript and PHP also? Let me explain.

I just found this website http://listeningroom.net and it's great. You can create/join rooms and upload tracks and listen to them together with friends.

I'd like to extract/scrape/get some specific data from a .json file. This file contains artist, album title, track title and more. I'd like to extract just the artist, album and track title.

http://listeningroom.net/room/chillasfuck/spins.json The .json file Contains the tracks played in the past 24 hours.

I managed to scrape the whole .json file with Python after looking around, (local .json file) with the following probably not so valid code.

   json_data=open('...\spins.json')

   data = json.load(json_data)
   pprint(data)

   json_data.close()

This prints out the following:

   [{u'endTime': u'1317752614105',
   u'id': u'cf37894e8eaf886a0d000000',
   u'length': 492330,
   u'metadata': {u'album': u'Mezzanine',
            u'artist': u'Massive Attack',
            u'bitrate': 128000,
            u'label': u'Virgin',
            u'length': 17494.479054779807,
            u'title': u'Group Four'},

Just a part of the print

1. I'd like to scrape it from an url (the one provided at the top) 2. Just get 'album', 'artist开发者_运维问答' and 'title' 3. Make sure it prints it as simple as possible like this:

Artist
Track title
Album

Artist
Track title
Album

4. If it's not too much, save it to a .txt file

I hope I could get some help, I really want to create this for myself, so I can check out more music!

Marvin

Python (after you loaded the json)

for elem in data:
    print('{artist}\n{title}\n{album}\n'.format(**elem['metadata']))

To save in a file:

with open('the_file_name.txt','w') as f:
    for elem in data:
        f.write('{artist}\n{title}\n{album}\n\n'.format(**elem['metadata']))

You're already really close.

data = json.load(json_data)

is taking the JSON string and converting it to a Python object - in this case, a list of dictionaries (plus 'metadata', which is a dictionary of dictionaries).

To get this into the format that you want, you just need to loop through the items.

for song in data:
    artist = song['metadata']['artist'] # This tells it where to look in the dictionary. It's looking for the dictionary item called 'metadata'. Then, looking inside that dictionary for 'artist'.
    album = song['metadata'['album']
    songTitle = song['metadata']['title']
    print '%s\n%s\n%s\n' % (artist, album, songTitle)

Or, to print it to a file:

with open('the_file_name.txt','w') as f:
    for song in data:
        artist = song['metadata']['artist']
        album = song['metadata'['album']
        songTitle = song['metadata']['title']
        f.write('%s\n%s\n%s\n' % (artist, album, songTitle))

Okay this is a bit short but the thing about json is that it translate an array into a string

eg. array['first'] = 'hello'; array['second'] = 'there';

will become [{u'first': u'hello', u'second': 'there'}]; after a jsonencode run that sting throu jsondecode and you get your array back

so simply run you json file thou a decoder and then you should be able to reach your data through:

array['metadata'].album
array['metadata'].artist
...

have never used python but it should be the same.

have a look at http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php it might clear upp a thing or two.

For PHP you need json.decode

<?php
      $json = file_get_contents($url);
      $val = json_decode($json);
      $room = $val[0]->metadata;
echo "Album : ".$room->album."\n";
echo "Artist : ".$room->artist."\n";
echo "Title : ".$room->title."\n";
?>

Outputs

Album  :  Future Sandwich
Artist :  Them, Roaringtwenties
Title  :  Fast Acting Nite-Nite Spray With Realistic Uncle Beard

Note its a truck load of JSON data there so you'll have to iterate adequately