How to fetch JSON via URL and parse in Python

Serkan SAKINMAZ
1 min readSep 1, 2023

In this post, I am going to explain simple a code snippet that is very helpful for lots of applications. With Python, we are going to fetch JSON content from the URL and parse some fields

We will use Python as a programming language. In Python, to request the content of the URL, you can use the requests library. Let’s test the following code snippet

response = requests.get(‘https://api.exchangerate.host/latest')
data = response.json()
print(data)

This code snippet prints the following output

{
“motd”:{
“msg”:”If you or your company use this project or like what we doing, please consider backing us so we can continue maintaining and evolving this project.”,
“url”:”https://exchangerate.host/#/donate"
},
“success”:true,
“base”:”EUR”,
“date”:”2023–09–01",
“rates”:{
“AED”:3.980607,
“AFN”:88.275247,
“ALL”:108.652558,
“AMD”:419.641174,

As a next step, what we want to do is to parse the data and show the USD exchange rate

json library allows to show the specific content of the JSON

print(data[“rates”][“USD”])

It shows the USD/EUR rates: 1.084458

Conclusion

In this blog, we have implemented a sample application that fetches JSON via URL. As you see, it is a very simple approach with Python applications.

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