python - parse string (which is an array) returned from a web service as array/list

Question

I am using

httplib.HTTPConnection(self._myurl)
conn.request("GET", "/")
data = conn.getresponse().read()

now this URL returns an python type arrays similar to the below:

[1,"apple",23,"good"]
[2,"grape",4,"bad"]

Now i am getting this result from the service as a string in data. How do i get this result parsed/encoded as array/list straight away without having to dissect it myself and create an array?

Answer 1

If the server is returning JSON (which it looks like it might be) it is a simple matter of:

import json

# ... snip ...

rehydrated_data = json.loads(data)

Answer 2

[updated]
Service was actually designed for stream rather than data in bulk. So that is why I was actually getting array of objects instead of array of array objects.

I handled it at javascript side finally using the following logic.

1. data = data.replace(']','],')
2. data = '[' + data.rstrip(',') + ']'
3. data = json.loads(data)

---

Reply to the above answer
Actually it is not, the json will be

{"key":[[...],[...]]}

I have tried the code and it fails with the following error.

...
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 326, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 369, in decode
    raise ValueError(errmsg("Extra data", s, end, len(s)))
ValueError: Extra data: line 2 column 1 - line 38 column 119 (char 25 - 4048)