1. JMESPath

We work with JSON data a lot in the real world. JMESPath (“james path”) makes it easy to extract and query values from a JSON document. To use it, install the jmespath package.

import jmespath

planets = {
    'planets': [
        {'name': 'mercury', 'is_solid': True},
        {'name': 'venus', 'is_solid': True},
        {'name': 'earth', 'is_solid': True},
        {'name': 'mars', 'is_solid': True},
        {'name': 'jupiter', 'is_solid': False},
        {'name': 'saturn', 'is_solid': False},
        {'name': 'uranus', 'is_solid': False},
        {'name': 'neptune', 'is_solid': False},
    ]
}

print(jmespath.search('planets[*].name', planets))
print(jmespath.search('planets[*].is_solid', planets))

For more information on JMESPath, check out the following links.

• JMESPath home page

• JMESPath examples

• JMESPath tutorial

2. python-dateutil

Date and time information is everywhere. It is not easy to parse, clean and format date and time information. The python-dateutil package can help ease the pain of dealing with date and time data.

from dateutil.parser import parse

logline = 'INFO 2021-12-31T23:59:11 Almost new year!'
timestamp = parse(logline, fuzzy=True)
print(timestamp)

3. termtables

If you have tabular data, you will find yourself wanting to pretty print the content from time to time if the data is not so big. There are many libraries to help you do so.

• termtable

• texttable

• prettytable

• tabulate

import termtables as tt

header = ['first_name', 'last_name', 'age', 'height', 'is_cool']
data = [
    ['john', 'doe', 23, 5.5, True],
    ['jack', 'johnson', 34, 6.2, False]
]

tt.print(
    data,
    header=header,
    style=tt.styles.markdown,
    padding=(0, 1),
    alignment="lcrlc"
)

4. Exercise

Build a tiny command-line report that combines third-party tools:

• use python-dateutil to parse three date strings in different formats

• store the parsed data in dictionaries

• use JMESPath to extract only the fields you want to display

• print the final result as a table with termtables or tabulate