Today I’ve been using cURL for testing an endpoint I’m developing with Django. The answer of the endpoint is in json format, so sometimes it is hard to read its output. Luckily Python has a module (json.tools) which can help us in that situation.
This is the output without using json.tools:
easydevmixin@bimbolane $ curl http://192.168.33.11:8000/api/v1/env/DEMO/uptime
[{"DEMO":{"0":{"2014-7":99.99},"1":{"2014-8":100.0},"2":{"2014-9":99.7},"3":{"2014-10":99.96},"4":{"2014-11":100.0},"5":{"2014-12":100.0},"6":{"2015-1":99.9},"7":{"2015-2":100.0},"8":{"2015-3":100.0},"9":{"2015-4":100.0},"10":{"2015-5":100.0},"11":{"2015-6":100.0}}}]
Hard to read, isn’t it?
This is the output using the module:
easydevmixin@bimbolane $ curl http://192.168.33.11:8000/api/v1/env/DEMO/uptime | python -m json.tool
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 268 0 268 0 0 1234 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1240
[
{
"NA1": {
"0": {
"2014-7": 99.99
},
"1": {
"2014-8": 99.97
},
"10": {
"2015-5": 99.95
},
"11": {
"2015-6": 99.96
},
"2": {
"2014-9": 99.87
},
"3": {
"2014-10": 100.0
},
"4": {
"2014-11": 100.0
},
"5": {
"2014-12": 100.0
},
"6": {
"2015-1": 100.0
},
"7": {
"2015-2": 99.99
},
"8": {
"2015-3": 100.0
},
"9": {
"2015-4": 100.0
}
}
}
]
You can use this ‘trick’ with Python >= 2.6 and Python 3 also. Until now the only handicap I’ve found is that json.tools sorts outs the JSON keys, and this is something you want to take care about.
Cheers!