Parsing Nested JSON with Python - Handling Dynamic Keys without Losing Data
I'm trying to implement Can someone help me understand I'm working on a project where I need to parse a deeply nested JSON object that contains dynamic keys. The JSON structure varies based on user input, and I want to extract specific fields while preserving their relationships. For instance, I have a JSON response that looks like this: ```json { "user": { "name": "John", "contacts": { "email": "john@example.com", "phone": "123-456-7890", "social": { "twitter": "@john", "linkedin": "john-linkedin" } } }, "orders": [ { "id": "001", "items": [ { "product": "A", "quantity": 1 }, { "product": "B", "quantity": 2 } ] }, { "id": "002", "items": [ { "product": "C", "quantity": 3 } ] } ] } ``` My goal is to retrieve the user's name, their email, and a list of all product names from the orders. I started with the following approach using Python's built-in `json` library: ```python import json # Simulating the JSON response json_data = '''{ ... (JSON data here) ... }''' data = json.loads(json_data) name = data['user']['name'] email = data['user']['contacts']['email'] products = [item['product'] for order in data['orders'] for item in order['items']] print(name, email, products) ``` This works fine, but Iām concerned about cases where certain keys might not exist, which could lead to `KeyError`. I want to implement a more robust solution that gracefully handles missing keys without breaking the parsing process. So far, I've tried using `dict.get()` to avoid errors, but I still find myself writing a lot of boilerplate code to check for each nested level, which is becoming unwieldy. I tried this: ```python name = data.get('user', {}).get('name', 'N/A') email = data.get('user', {}).get('contacts', {}).get('email', 'N/A') ``` While this prevents crashes from missing keys, the code feels cumbersome and difficult to read. Is there a more elegant solution or a library that can help simplify this process while still allowing me to preserve the structure of the data? I also want to ensure that I can maintain performance since some JSON responses can be quite large. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Any suggestions would be helpful. Am I missing something obvious?