107

I have a very long and complicated json object but I only want to get the items/keys in the first level!

Example:

{
    "1": "a", 
    "3": "b", 
    "8": {
        "12": "c", 
        "25": "d"
    }
}

I want to get 1,3,8 as result!

I found this code:

for key, value in data.iteritems():
    print key, value

But it prints all keys (also 12 and 25)

karthikr
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TeNNoX
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    No, it doesn't. It prints the keys, and the values which themselves include the sub-dictionaries. If you just want to print the keys, don't print the value. – Daniel Roseman Apr 03 '13 at 13:46
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    possible duplicate of [Python: how to print a dictionary's key?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5904969/python-how-to-print-a-dictionarys-key) – 000 Apr 03 '13 at 13:51

4 Answers4

175

Just do a simple .keys()

>>> dct = {
...     "1": "a", 
...     "3": "b", 
...     "8": {
...         "12": "c", 
...         "25": "d"
...     }
... }
>>> 
>>> dct.keys()
['1', '8', '3']
>>> for key in dct.keys(): print key
...
1
8
3
>>>

If you need a sorted list:

keylist = dct.keys() # this is of type `dict_key`, NOT a `list`
keylist.sort()

And if you want them as simple list, do this:

list(dct_instance.keys())
Maifee Ul Asad
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karthikr
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25
for key in data.keys():
    print key
000
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9

As Karthik mentioned, dct.keys() will work but it will return all the keys in dict_keys type not in list type. So if you want all the keys in a list, then list(dct.keys()) will work.

Praveen Manupati
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3

A good way to check whether a python object is an instance of a type is to use isinstance() which is Python's 'built-in' function. For Python 3.6:

dct = {
       "1": "a", 
       "3": "b", 
       "8": {
            "12": "c", 
            "25": "d"
           }
      }

for key in dct.keys():
    if isinstance(dct[key], dict)== False:
       print(key, dct[key])
#shows:
# 1 a
# 3 b
Hafizur Rahman
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