Python strip only single specific characters from text/json

Question

I'm currently trying to scrape data from a website and want to automatically save them. I want to format the data before so I can use them as cvs or similar. The json is:

{"counts":{"default":"27","quick_mode1":"48","quick_mode2":"13","custom":"281","quick_mode3":"0","total":369}}

My code is:

x = '{"counts":{"default":"27","quick_mode1":"48","quick_mode2":"13","custom":"281","quick_mode3":"0","total":369}}'

y = json.loads(x)

print(y["total"])

But due to the {"counts": on the beginning and the corresponding } on the end I can't just use it as a normal json file because the formatting breaks and it just puts an error message out (json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)), when I remove the characters manually it then works again.

How can I get rid of only those 2 parts?

Answer 1

I think that json library should go along with this, but if it really is an issue you can't get rid of, you could remove all occurrences of { and } characters in the string you are are receiving with .replace() function.

This requires chaining for every character you want to remove and is rather not an optimal solution, but as far as the strings you are processing are not long and/or you are not concerned about efficiency this should do just fine.

Example:

my_var.replace('{', '').replace('}', '')