Wednesday, July 01, 2015

Parsing JSON With Python

Ok, in the last couple of weeks I've been working with Google Geocoding but realised how easy it is to parse the return JSON in Python. In fact, I was parsing the JSON result with Javascript - which does a very nice job, but i needed or rather prefered to have better control than what Javascript provides.

And this is where Python comes in. If you have been working with Python for a while, you will have noticed that JSON is nothing more than a Python Dictionary. This makes accessing the key/value quite effortless. To give you a simple example, here's an output of a simple address query using Google's Geocoding API: http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=8-10%20Broadway,%20London%20SW1H%200BG,%20United%20Kingdom&sensor=false

{
   "results" : [
      {
         "address_components" : [
            {
               "long_name" : "8-10",
               "short_name" : "8-10",
               "types" : [ "street_number" ]
            },
            {
               "long_name" : "Broadway",
               "short_name" : "Broadway",
               "types" : [ "route" ]
            },
            {
               "long_name" : "Westminster",
               "short_name" : "Westminster",
               "types" : [ "sublocality", "political" ]
            },
            {
               "long_name" : "London",
               "short_name" : "London",
               "types" : [ "locality", "political" ]
            },
            {
               "long_name" : "Greater London",
               "short_name" : "Gt Lon",
               "types" : [ "administrative_area_level_2", "political" ]
            },
            {
               "long_name" : "United Kingdom",
               "short_name" : "GB",
               "types" : [ "country", "political" ]
            },
            {
               "long_name" : "SW1H 0BG",
               "short_name" : "SW1H 0BG",
               "types" : [ "postal_code" ]
            },
            {
               "long_name" : "London",
               "short_name" : "London",
               "types" : [ "postal_town" ]
            }
         ],
         "formatted_address" : "8-10 Broadway, Westminster, London, Greater London SW1H 0BG, UK",
         "geometry" : {
            "location" : {
               "lat" : 51.49873430,
               "lng" : -0.13312210
            },
            "location_type" : "ROOFTOP",
            "viewport" : {
               "northeast" : {
                  "lat" : 51.50008328029150,
                  "lng" : -0.1317731197084980
               },
               "southwest" : {
                  "lat" : 51.49738531970850,
                  "lng" : -0.1344710802915020
               }
            }
         },
         "types" : [ "street_address" ]
      }
   ],
   "status" : "OK"
} 
 
What is displayed above is the result of the URL we supplied to Google's
 Geocoding API. Of course, we couldn't display that to our users - that 
would be daft. Most of the time you'd want to parse this info and use 
the values in your application.
 In our case we had to extract the Lat and Long for our application. 
There was no need to display the JSON - Python makes this a breeze and 
all we need is to use Python's urllib2 module to open up the URL and 
read the result. 

So, to parse that and display the full address in human-readable format, it's as simple as doing something list this:

>>> import json
>>> import urllib2
>>> j = urllib2.urlopen('http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=8-10%20Broadway,%20London%20SW1H%200BG,%20United%20Kingdom&sensor=false')
>>> js = json.load(j)


Please note that we used load() instead of loads(). You would typically 
use loads() for strings, but load() is designed for resources such as 
files and - and in our example - a URL.

Now to display the address, we simply loop through our dictionary like so:

>>> ourResult = js['results'][0]['address_components']
>>> for rs in ourResult:
...     print rs['long_name']
...
8-10
Broadway
Westminster
London
Greater London
United Kingdom
SW1H 0BG
London
>>>


With that out of the way, what about our main focus which is to print the coordinate of a particular address? Well, it turns out that that is even a lot simpler.
This time we just navigate our way down until we find what we're after. Which in this case is the latitude and longitude. 

>>> ourResult = js['results'][0]['geometry']['location']
>>> print ourResult['lat'], ourResult['lng']
    51.4987343 -0.1331221
>>>


One other cool thing about parsing JSON with Python is that you can 
quickly and easily map the results into your Django Model and do 
anything dangoey with it. Here's an example:
objs = json.loads(request.POST)
# Iterate through the stuff in the list
for o in objs:
    # Do something Djangoey with o's name and message, like
    record = myDjangoModel(name = o.name, message = o.message)
    record.save()


Now, if you are looking to mix Python, JSON and Django together - it is as simple what we've just shown above.
                     

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Testing Python: Applying Unit Testing, TDD, BDD and Acceptance Testing

This is a long overdue book. Python has been steadily growing in popularity in multiple industry verticals over the past decade and the different sub-cultures have brought a variety of programming styles and methodologies to the language. As more and more Python code is powering today's production and mission-critical systems it becomes essential to ensure quality and reliability while maintaining efficient and agile development practices.

There has been a flurry of literature written in recent years about the overall benefits of agile methodologies and test-driven development. To a large extent, however, individual developers and teams have been left on their own to figure out how to put this philosophy to practice and extract maximum benefit from it in their trade.

David Sale's book alleviates this issue for Python developers by providing extremely pragmatic, timely and well-organized guidelines as well as many specific examples on how to approach the development and testing of complex systems in a way that amounts to building better software.This is not an academic work - it focuses exclusively on practical solutions to real-world industry problems.

Fairly short and to the point, the book mixes equal portions of justification and tutorial-style examples to work through.

The author has picked some of the best Python tools that are currently available for the various tasks at hand, but the reader will be well equipped to make their own choices once they understand the basic concepts.
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