Representing data-structure in python

Question

What's the best way to represent this data-structure in python:

[{'x': 230, 'y': 50}, {'x': 350, 'y': 50}, {'x': 410, 'y': 50}]

It's not json, it's something else, sorry for my stupidity, I'm searching various python tutorials, but can't figure out if it's some structure that can be easily loaded like numpy.load or json.loads, because when I try validating that structure as JSON, it says invalid json...

Well that is a list of dictionaries, what do you want to do with that data? — Dani Mesejo
– Dani Mesejo, Commented Dec 7, 2018 at 18:34
It's not JSON, but it easily could be made as such. json.dumps() would suffice to serialize it. Your question is unclear to me. — roganjosh
– roganjosh, Commented Dec 7, 2018 at 18:35
But it already is that. It's a list of dictionaries. Where does JSON come into this? — roganjosh
– roganjosh, Commented Dec 7, 2018 at 18:38

timgeb · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-07 18:51:51Z

1

You have a list of three dictionaries (mappings of keys to values) and it works like this:

>>> dicts = [{'x': 230, 'y': 50}, {'x': 350, 'y': 50}, {'x': 410, 'y': 50}]
>>> dicts[0]
{'x': 230, 'y': 50}
>>> dicts[0]['x']
230
>>> dicts[2]['y']
50

Since all the dictionaries share the same keys ('x' and 'y') in your example you can interpret them as records.

A neat way to represent these records is with a pandas.DataFrame, which has a table-like printout.

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> pd.DataFrame(dicts)
     x   y
0  230  50
1  350  50
2  410  50

If you have a string

>>> s = "[{'x': 230, 'y': 50}, {'x': 350, 'y': 50}, {'x': 410, 'y': 50}]"

you can evaluate it safely with ast.literal_eval.

>>> from ast import literal_eval
>>> literal_eval(s)
[{'x': 230, 'y': 50}, {'x': 350, 'y': 50}, {'x': 410, 'y': 50}]

edited Dec 7, 2018 at 18:51

answered Dec 7, 2018 at 18:41

timgeb

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2 Comments

Aleksandar Pavić Over a year ago

I have actually loaded above code with dicts = eval( another variable with that string)...

timgeb Over a year ago

@AleksandarPavić consider ast.literal_eval, it's the save version of eval for literals like strings, lists, dicts, ...

mikeg · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-07 18:39:44Z

1

What you have there is a list of dictionaries.

myList = []

dict1 = {'x': 230, 'y': 50}
dict2 = {'x': 350, 'y': 50}
dict3 = {'x': 410, 'y': 50}

myList.append(dict1)
myList.append(dict2)
myList.append(dict3)

answered Dec 7, 2018 at 18:39

mikeg

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1 Comment

Aleksandar Pavić Over a year ago

But I can't just something.load it? I need to do string parser for it? to break on } , { and append it?

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