Unicode from USGS website

[tandrasfay]

I was able to successfully read the data into python using json.loads, but after printing, the data appear to be in unicode as everything has a u' in front of it: "u'geometry': {u'type': u'Point', u'coordinates'" for example.
This leads to a problem trying to extract elements because I keep getting these types of attribute errors.
AttributeError: 'unicode' object has no attribute 'iteritems'

Has anyone else had this problem? If so, how did you work around it?

[teresita]

I've been having trouble with this too and the JSON documentation isn't very helpful, so I just did

sudo pip install --upgrade pandas

to upgrade my version of pandas to be able to use the pandas read_json function. hoping that helps.

[kqdtran]

@teresita I'm curious about how you got read_json to work? :o I've been playing around with it to no avail so far. Edit: oops, I meant read_json with the error that @reenashah mentioned in #3, not installation error.

@tandrasfay I think you can access the dictionary items without worrying about unicode. For example, if your dictionary is quakes, you can do quakes['geometry']. It seems to work for me without any unicode error, so keep us posted :-)

[GalaxyNight-day]

Try

sudo apt-get install python-pandas

it worked for me

[kqdtran]

Oops, I meant the ValueError: arrays must all be same length with read_json, not installation error :D. Edited my post above.

[teresita]

@kqdtran yeah, I ran into that error too, right after posting..

I'm starting to think that a data frame isn't the best way to represent these data. Maybe there's another way to parse it to extract only the parameters that we're interested in..

[aculich]

The answer to everything here can be found in Issue #8 and we covered this in Office Hours, as well, so i am going to close this now.

@teresita Glad you found and shared a solution to upgrade pandas since the read_json function was missing from the version we were using.