Regex for Extracting Nested JSON Objects from API Responses - Handling Complex Structures
I'm getting frustrated with I've spent hours debugging this and I tried several approaches but none seem to work... Recently started working with a project that involves integrating multiple third-party APIs. One of the challenges I'm facing is extracting nested JSON objects from their responses using regex. Although regex is not typically the go-to for parsing JSON, the API responses can vary significantly, and I want to avoid using a full JSON parser in certain scenarios for performance reasons. Given the following JSON structure: ```json { "data": { "user": { "id": 123, "name": "John Doe", "preferences": { "theme": "dark", "notifications": true } } } } ``` I'm trying to extract the user preferences using regex. The ideal output should just capture the `preferences` object. Here’s the regex pattern I’ve tried: ``` "preferences":\s*(\{.*?\}) ``` However, this method fails when there are additional nested objects or arrays within the `preferences`, leading to incomplete matches. I've also explored non-greedy quantifiers, but the complexity of the JSON keeps leading to false captures or misses. Here’s a snippet that’s part of my extraction function: ```python import re response = '''{...}''' # API response goes here pattern = r'"preferences":\s*(\{.*?\})' match = re.search(pattern, response) if match: preferences = match.group(1) print(preferences) ``` While this seems to work for simple cases, I realize it might break when the structure changes slightly, such as when new keys are added or if there are additional nested arrays. Looking for guidance on how to improve this regex or if there's a more robust way to handle varying nested structures without moving to a full JSON parser. Any recommendations on best practices or alternative approaches would be greatly appreciated! My development environment is Ubuntu. What am I doing wrong? I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning Python. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this.