[python] How do I get JSON data from RESTful service using Python?

Is there any standard way of getting JSON data from RESTful service using Python?

I need to use kerberos for authentication.

some snippet would help.

If you desire to use Python 3, you can use the following:

import json
import urllib.request
req = urllib.request.Request('url')
with urllib.request.urlopen(req) as response:
    result = json.loads(response.readall().decode('utf-8'))

You basically need to make a HTTP request to the service, and then parse the body of the response. I like to use httplib2 for it:

import httplib2 as http
import json

try:
    from urlparse import urlparse
except ImportError:
    from urllib.parse import urlparse

headers = {
    'Accept': 'application/json',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json; charset=UTF-8'
}

uri = 'http://yourservice.com'
path = '/path/to/resource/'

target = urlparse(uri+path)
method = 'GET'
body = ''

h = http.Http()

# If you need authentication some example:
if auth:
    h.add_credentials(auth.user, auth.password)

response, content = h.request(
        target.geturl(),
        method,
        body,
        headers)

# assume that content is a json reply
# parse content with the json module
data = json.loads(content)

Well first of all I think rolling out your own solution for this all you need is urllib2 or httplib2 . Anyways in case you do require a generic REST client check this out .

https://github.com/scastillo/siesta

However i think the feature set of the library will not work for most web services because they shall probably using oauth etc .. . Also I don't like the fact that it is written over httplib which is a pain as compared to httplib2 still should work for you if you don't have to handle a lot of redirections etc ..

I would give the requests library a try for this. Essentially just a much easier to use wrapper around the standard library modules (i.e. urllib2, httplib2, etc.) you would use for the same thing. For example, to fetch json data from a url that requires basic authentication would look like this:

import requests

response = requests.get('http://thedataishere.com',
                         auth=('user', 'password'))
data = response.json()

For kerberos authentication the requests project has the reqests-kerberos library which provides a kerberos authentication class that you can use with requests:

import requests
from requests_kerberos import HTTPKerberosAuth

response = requests.get('http://thedataishere.com',
                         auth=HTTPKerberosAuth())
data = response.json()