Convert Google results object (pure js) to Python object

Question

So I'm trying to use Google Map suggest API to request place name suggestions. Unfortunately I can't find the docs for this bit.

Here is an example URI:

http://maps.google.com/maps/suggest?q=lon&cp=3&ll=55.0,-3.5&spn=11.9,1.2&hl=en&gl=uk&v=2

which returns:

{suggestion:[{query:"London",...

I want to use this in python (2.5). Now in proper JSON there would have been quotations around the keys like so:

{"suggestion":[{"query":"London",...

and I could have used simplejson or something, but as it is I'm a bit stuck.

There are two possible solutions here; either I can get to the API code and find an option to return proper JSON, or I do that in python.

Any ideas please.

Answer 1

I would try to poke around in order to get JSON, but failing that there's this little monstrosity which someone will inevitably yell at me about:

class Iden(object):
  def __getitem__(name, index):
    return index

notjson = '{...}'

data = eval(notjson, {}, Iden())

Answer 2

Ugh, that's indeed pretty annoying. It's a JavaScript literal but it — pointlessly — isn't JSON.

In theory you are supposed to be able to import json.decoder.JSONDecoder from the Python stdlib (or simplejson pre-2.6, which is the same) and subclass it, then pass that subclass to json.loads to override decoder behaviour. In reality this isn't really feasible as json.decoder is full of global cross-references that resist subclassing, and the bit you need to change is slap bang in the middle of def JSONObject.

So it's probably worth looking at other Python JSON libraries. I found this one which, in ‘non-strict’ mode, will parse unquoted object property names:

>>> import demjson
>>> demjson.decode('{suggestion:[{query:"London",interpretation: ...')
{u'suggestion': [{u'query': u'London', u'operation': 2, u'interpretation': ...