How to format JSON data when writing to a file

Question

I'm trying to get this api request and have it formatted when I dump it into the JSON file. Whenever I do, its all one string and very hard to read. I've tried adding the indent but it didn't do anything. I can provide the API key if needed.

import json, requests

url = "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast/city?id=524901&APPID={APIKEY}"
response = requests.get(url)
response.raise_for_status()

with open('weather.json', 'w') as outfile:
     json.dump(response.text, outfile, indent=4)

Answer 1

There are a couple problems with your code, I think.

First of all, it's considered better form to write unrelated imports on separate lines instead of separated by a comma. We generally only use commas when doing things like from module import thing1, thing2.

I'm assuming you left {APIKEY} in the URL as a placeholder, but just in case: you will need to insert your API key there. You can do this with a .format call as-is.

You call response.raise_for_status(). This ought to be wrapped in a try/except block since if the request fails, this raises an exception. Your code will just barf and you'll be SOL at that point.

But here's the most important thing: the response.text is a string. json.dump only works with dictionaries. You'll need a dictionary, so use response.json() to get it. (Alternatively, if you wanted to manipulate the JSON first, you could get it from the string by doing json_string = json.loads(response.text).)

---

Here's what it should probably come out to:

import json
import requests

# Replace this with your API key.
api_key = '0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef'

url = ("http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast/city?"
       "id=524901&APPID={APIKEY}".format(APIKEY=api_key))
response = requests.get(url)

try:
    response.raise_for_status()
except requests.exceptions.HTTPError:
    pass
    # Handle bad request, e.g. a 401 if you have a bad API key.

with open('weather.json', 'w') as outfile:
     json.dump(response.json(), outfile, indent=4)