string indices must be integers while parsing JSON - python

Question

I am new to python and facing this error: string indices must be integers while parsing a JSON file.

JSON File:

{"NFLTeams": [
  {"code":"ARI","fullName":"Arizona Cardinals","shortName":"Arizona"},
  {"code":"ATL","fullName":"Atlanta Falcons","shortName":"Atlanta"},
  {"code":"WAS","fullName":"Washington Redskins","shortName":"Washington"}
]}

My code:

import urllib.request as ur
import urllib.parse
import json

url = 'http://www.fantasyfootballnerd.com/service/nfl-teams/json/test/'
user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64)'
values = {'name' : 'Michael Foord',
          'location' : 'Northampton',
          'language' : 'Python' }
headers = { 'User-Agent' : user_agent }

data = urllib.parse.urlencode(values)
data = data.encode('ascii')
req = urllib.request.Request(url, data, headers)
response = urllib.request.urlopen(req)
the_page = response.read().decode('utf-8')

print (the_page)
team_data = json.loads(the_page)

print (type(team_data))  // team_data is type dict

for item in team_data:
    print (item['NFLTeams'][0]["code"])
    print (item['NFLTeams'][0]['fullName'])
    print (item['NFLTeams'][0]['shortName'])

I have tried to print the following:

print (item['NFLTeams']["code"]) 

And this:

for item in team_data['NFLTeams'].values():
    print (item["code"])
    print (item['fullName'])
    print (item['shortName'])

Which gives me this error:

for item in team_data['NFLTeams'].values():
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'values'

Can anyone please help me figure out what's going on? Thank you.

Answer 1

.values() is used to loop through the values of a dictionary however, team_data['NFLTeams'] is a list containing dictionaries. Thus, you need to remove .values() to access each dictionary whilst iterating:

for item in team_data['NFLTeams']:
    print (item["code"])
    print (item['fullName'])
    print (item['shortName'])

If you really want to use .values():

for item in team_data.values()[0]:
    print (item["code"])
    print (item['fullName'])
    print (item['shortName'])

Please keep in mind that .values() returns a view object in Python 3.x, so you need to force evaluating it using list() in order to access the elements by index:

for item in list(team_data.values())[0]: