extract data from a dictionary returned by pycurl

Question

I have this:

import pycurl
import pprint
import json

c = pycurl.Curl()
c.setopt(c.URL, 'https://mydomainname.com')

c.perform()

the above code return a dictionary like this:

{"name":"steve", "lastvisit":"10-02-2012", "age":12}

I want to loop through that dictionary and get just the age:

age : 12

I tried:

diction = {}
diction = c.perform()
pprint.pprint(diction["age"])

No data returned and I got this error:

TypeError: 'NoneType' object is unsubscriptable

Answer 1

c.perform() doesn't return anything, you need to configure a file-like object to capture the value. A BytesIO object would do, you can then call .getvalue() on that after the call completes:

import pycurl
import pprint
import json
from io import BytesIO

c = pycurl.Curl()
data = BytesIO()

c.setopt(c.URL, 'https://mydomainname.com')
c.setopt(c.WRITEFUNCTION, data.write)
c.perform()

dictionary = json.loads(data.getvalue())
pprint.pprint(dictionary["age"])

If you are not married to pycurl, you might find requests to be a lot easier:

import pprint
import requests

dictionary = requests.get('https://mydomainname.com').json()
pprint.pprint(dictionary["age"])

Even the standard library urllib.request module will be easier than using pycurl:

from urllib.request import urlopen
import pprint
import json

response = urlopen('https://mydomainname.com')
dictionary = json.load(response)
pprint.pprint(dictionary["age"])