Parsing unquoted JavaScript object literal as JSON using YAML & JSON modules

Question

I have scraped a JavaScript object which I can't parse as JSON because it has unquoted keys.

I found a solution here which says to load the object as a Python data structure using the PyYaml library, and then write it back out as valid JSON:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/31030022/10601287

This would be a great solution for me, however yaml.load(js_obj) causes the keys & values to merge together as a key, and causes the value to default to 'None'. This is my code snippet:

import yaml

yaml_obj = yaml.safe_load(js_obj)

print(yaml_obj)

Example of the JavaScript Object before loaded as YAML (in reality it is much bigger than this):

{
  path:"1/83656/83659/83669/83670",
  is_active:!0,
  level:4,
  children_count:0,
  product_count:59,
  parent_id:83669,
  name:"Red Wine",
  position:1,
  id:83670,
  include_in_menu:1,
  url_key:"red-wine-83670",
  url_path:"liquor/wine/red-wine.html",
  _score:null,
  slug:"red-wine-83670"
}

After yaml.load(js_obj):

{
  'path:"1/83656/83659/83669/83670"': None, 
  'is_active:!0': None, 
  'level:4': None, 
  'children_count:0': None, 
  'product_count:59': None, 
  'parent_id:83669': None, 
  'name:"Red Wine"': None, 
  'position:1': None, 
  'id:83670': None, 
  'include_in_menu:1': None, 
  'url_key:"red-wine-83670"': None, 
  'url_path:"liquor/wine/red-wine.html"': None, 
  '_score:null': None, 
  'slug:"red-wine-83670"': None
}

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Yes unfortunately I do because I am actually using an analytics software called Knime, where I can only use Python scripts. — Nancy Collins
– Nancy Collins, Commented Apr 19, 2021 at 14:44

rici · Accepted Answer · 2021-04-19 16:04:13Z

1

YAML requires the colon in a mapping to be followed by at least one space character, so your input isn't valid YAML either. If the format is as simple as your example indicates, you could preprocess it into YAML by searching for a word at the beginning of a line followed by a colon and inserting a space after the colon. (Or you could insert quotes around the word to make it JSON, but you're going have a problem with is_active:!0,, because !0 isn't a JSON value.)

So you could try something like:

import re
first_word = re.compile(r"^\s*[_a-zA-Z]\w*:") 

# ...
    yaml_obj = yaml.load(first_word.replace(r"\g<0> ", js_obj))

Of course, if the input is less regular, that could fail horribly.

edited Apr 19, 2021 at 16:04

answered Apr 19, 2021 at 15:48

rici

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