Combining and loading Json content as python dictionary - json

Question

Ihave 100 json files (file1- file 100)in my directory.All these 100 have the same fields and my aim is to load allcontents in one dictionary or dataframe.Basically the content of each file (ie file1- file100) willbe a row for my dictionary or dataframe
To test the code first,I wrote a script to load contents from one json file
file2 = open(r"\Users\sbz\file1.txt","w+")
import json
import traceback
def read_json_file(file2):
with open(file2, "r") as f:
try:
return json.load(f)
for combining i wrote this
def combine_dictionaries(dictionary_list):
my_dictionary = {}
for key in dictionary_list:
my_dictionary.update(key)
return my_dictionary
I am unable to load the file or display contents of dictionary using print(file2)
Is there something I am missing? Or is there better wayto loop in all 100 files and load them as a single dictionary?

Answer 1

If json.load isn't working, my guess is that your JSON file is probably formatted incorrectly. Try getting it to work with a simple file like:
{
"test": 0
}
After that works, then try loading one of your 100 files. I copy-pasted your read_json_file function and I'm able to see the data in my file: print(read_json_file("data.json"))
For looping through the files and combining them:
It doesn't look like your combine_dictionaries function is 100% there yet for what you want to do. update doesn't merge the dictionaries into rows as you want; it will replace the keys of one dictionary with the keys of another, and since each file has the same fields the resulting dictionary will be the last one in the list. Technically, a list of dictionaries is already a list of rows which is what you want and you can index the list based on row number, for example, list_of_dictionaries[0] will get the dictionary created from file1 if you fill the list in order of file1 to file100. If you want to go further than file numbers, you can put all of these dictionaries into another dictionary if you can generate a unique key for each dictionary:
def combine_dictionaries(dictionary_list):
my_dictionary = {}
for dictionary in dictionary_list:
my_dictionary[generate_key(dictionary)] = dictionary
return my_dictionary
Where generate_key is a function that will return a key unique to that dictionary. Now combined_dictionary.get(0) will get file1's dictionary, and combined_dictionary.get(0).get("somefield") will get the "somefield" data from file1.