Looping through nested dictionary

Question

I am attempting to get data from a JSON file found at https://fantasy.premierleague.com/drf/event/19/live. However, I'm running into a problem whenever I loop through the data received.

The first loop in my code below should be appending the value in data["elements"]["1"]["stats"]["goals_scored"], but I'm getting the error string indices must be integers whenever I run this the code below. Whenever I reference data["elements"]["number"]["stats"]["goals_scored"]directly, it returns the correct number just fine.

import json
import requests

def goalCalculator():
    data=requests.get("https://fantasy.premierleague.com/drf/event/19/live").json()
    list1=[]
    for i in data["elements"]:
        list1.append(i["stats"]["goals_scored"])
    return list1

goalCalculator()

I have mapped the JSON file out (below), but I can't see where I'm going wrong. Shouldn't my code be working fine?

"elements":{
    "1":{
        "stats":{
            "yellow_cards":0,
            "own_goals":0,
            "creativity":0.0,
            "goals_conceded":0,
            "bonus":0,
            "red_cards":0,
            "saves":0,
            "influence":0.0,
            "bps":0,
            "clean_sheets":0,
            "assists":0,
            "ict_index":0.0,
            "goals_scored":0,
            "threat":0.0,
            "penalties_missed":0,
            "total_points":0,
            "penalties_saved":0,
            "in_dreamteam":false,
            "minutes":0
        }
    },
    "2":{etc...

What do u thinkg about to use `for key, value in data["elements"]:` and then `value["stats"]["goals_scored"]` — SerCrAsH, Dec 28 '18 at 20:24
possible duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3294889/iterating-over-dictionaries-using-for-loops — gogaz, Dec 28 '18 at 20:26

Mark Keane · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-28T20:32:31.777

for i in data["elements"]:

The above does not loop through the elements in the dictionary, instead it loops through the keys. I would do something like this:

import json
import requests

def goalCalculator():
    data=requests.get("https://fantasy.premierleague.com/drf/event/19/live").json()
    list1=[]
    for key, value in data["elements"].iteritems():
        list1.append(value["stats"]["goals_scored"])
    return list1

goalCalculator()

If you do not need the keys at all for what you are doing, you can use (as suggested by the helpful user who commented on my answer) .values() like so:

import json
import requests

    def goalCalculator():
        data=requests.get("https://fantasy.premierleague.com/drf/event/19/live").json()
        list1=[]
        for nested_dict in data["elements"].values():
            list1.append(nested_dict["stats"]["goals_scored"])
        return list1

    goalCalculator()

Using the `values` dictionary method would avoid having to throw away `key` variable returned from `iteritems`. Also, this avoids the issue if using Python 3 since `iteritems` isn't an option. — busybear, Dec 29 '18 at 02:31

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 28 '18 at 20:33

Instead of

for i in data["elements"]:
    list1.append(i["stats"]["goals_scored"])

use

for i in data["elements"]:
    list1.append(data["elements"][i]["stats"]["goals_scored"])

The i in the loop is the key of the data["elements"] dictionary and not the complete element as you are assuming. It would simply be "1" in your example, so you cannot index that. You will need to get the complete element which will be data["elements"][i]

Looping through nested dictionary

2 Answers2