Parsing and saving JSON result from GoEuro API

• The Python documentation recommends using with when dealing with files at the bottom of 7.2.1 of the Python tutorial, this has the benefit that you do not have to close the file yourself.

• Although not necessary often a main function is made, so that the other functions also can be used as a module. (6.1.1. Executing modules as scripts)

• The long line with the write statement can be split over multiple lines, you do not need the line joining character (\) in this case because, a closing bracket is still expected at the end of the line.

• The newline problem, and simular problems can be solved with the join function of strings

I took the liberty to create an extra function and all and all i changed your code to:

from urllib2 import urlopen
import json

def get_json(url):
    response = urlopen(url)
    data = response.read().decode("utf-8")
    return json.loads(data)

def json_to_formatted_text(geo_data):
    formatted_lines = []
    for x in geo_data:
        gp = x["geo_position"]
        l = gp["latitude"]
        o = gp["longitude"]
        line = (unicode(x["_id"]).encode("utf-8")  + ", " +
                unicode(x["name"]).encode("utf-8") + ", " + 
                unicode(x["type"]).encode("utf-8") + ", " + 
                unicode(l).encode("utf-8")         + ", " + 
                unicode(o).encode("utf-8")         + 
                unicode("\n").encode("utf-8"))
        formatted_lines.append(line)
    return unicode("\n").encode("utf-8").join(formatted_lines)

def main(): 
    url = ("http://api.goeuro.com/api/v2/position/suggest/en/Berlin")
    json_array = get_json(url)
    out_text   = json_to_formatted_text(json_array)
    with open('data.txt', 'w') as f:
        f.write(out_text)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Building on @JanKulken's answer, you could simplify the function json_to_formatted_text even more by defining a helper function to do the encoding, define a constant for the encoding of a line-break and then use str.format in that function:

def _encode(s):
    return unicode(s).encode("utf-8")

LINEBREAK = _encode("\n")


def json_to_formatted_text(geo_data):
    formatted_lines = []
    for x in geo_data:
        x["lat"] = x["geo_position"]["latitude"]
        x["lon"] = x["geo_position"]["longitude"]
        line = _encode("{name}, {type}, {lat}, {lon}\n".format(**x))
        formatted_lines.append(line)
    return LINEBREAK.join(formatted_lines)

(The other functions are the same as in his answer.)