Python: Parsing a JSON HTTP chunking stream

Mark NeedhamDecember 3rd, 2015Last Updated: November 30th, 2015

0 55 1 minute read

I’ve been playing around with meetup.com’s API again and this time wanted to consume the chunked HTTP RSVP stream and filter RSVPs for events I’m interested in.

I use Python for most of my hacking these days and if HTTP requests are required the requests library is my first port of call.

I started out with the following script

import requests
import json
 
def stream_meetup_initial():
    uri = "http://stream.meetup.com/2/rsvps"
    response = requests.get(uri, stream = True)
    for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size = None):
        yield chunk
 
for raw_rsvp in stream_meetup_initial():
    print raw_rsvp
    try:
        rsvp = json.loads(raw_rsvp)
    except ValueError as e:
        print e
        continue

This mostly worked but I also noticed the following error from time to time:

No JSON object could be decoded

Although less frequent, I also saw errors suggesting I was trying to parse an incomplete JSON object. I tweaked the function to keep a local buffer and only yield that if the chunk ended in a new line character:

def stream_meetup_newline():
    uri = "http://stream.meetup.com/2/rsvps"
    response = requests.get(uri, stream = True)
    buffer = ""
    for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size = 1):
        if chunk.endswith("\n"):
            buffer += chunk
            yield buffer
            buffer = ""
        else:
            buffer += chunk

This mostly works although I’m sure I’ve seen some occasions where two JSON objects were being yielded and then the call to ‘json.loads’ failed. I haven’t been able to reproduce that though.

A second read through the requests documentation made me realise I hadn’t read it very carefully the first time since we can make our lives much easier by using ‘iter_lines’ rather than ‘iter_content’:

r = requests.get('http://stream.meetup.com/2/rsvps', stream=True)
for raw_rsvp in r.iter_lines():
    if raw_rsvp:
        rsvp = json.loads(raw_rsvp)
        print rsvp

We can then process ‘rsvp’, filtering out the ones we’re interested in.

Reference:

Python: Parsing a JSON HTTP chunking stream from our WCG partner Mark Needham at the Mark Needham Blog blog.