Convert API response data (Bytes) to dict in Python [duplicate]

Question

URL = "API URL"
response = urllib.request.urlopen(URL)
standards = response.read() #returning type <bytes>
standards = standards.decode('utf-8') #converting type <str>

I actually want to read through the data and extract the values of "referenceNumber" & "title" from the data given below, I have 755 records of same structure. I want to extract the above given fields for each record.

[{"larsCode":0,"referenceNumber":"ST0870","title":"Business support assistant","status":"Withdrawn","url":"https://www.instituteforapprenticeships.org/api/apprenticeshipstandards/0","versionNumber":"0.0","change":"Withdrawn","changedDate":"2019-07-31T00:00:00","earliestStartDate":null,"latestStartDate":null,"latestEndDate":null,"overviewOfRole":"","level":2,"typicalDuration":0,"maxFunding":0,"route":"Business and administration","keywords":["Business","support","assistant","admin","office","office administration"],"jobRoles":[],"entryRequirements":"","assessmentPlanUrl":"","ssa1":"","ssa2":"","version":"0.0","standardInformation":"","occupationalSummary":"","knowledges":[],"behaviours":[],"skills":[],"options":[],"optionsUnstructuredTemplate":[]]

Answer 1

The server returns json encoded bytes. Python has a module for json.

You dont need to convert it to str in order to decode the json bytes.

Look at the python documentation for handling json objects.

Specifically json.loads for handling str or json.load for handling file like objects. https://docs.python.org/3/library/json.html#json.loads

Just an fyi, your response is a list of objects so json.loads will return a list of dict.