python: extract symbol from list and eliminate unicode

Question

I want to create list for symbols as below:

output = ['A','AA','AABA'...'ZYNE']

The current output is

[
    {u'name': u'Agilent Technologies Inc.', 
     u'symbol': u'A',
     u'iexId': u'2',
     u'date': u'2018-02-12',
     u'type': u'cs',
     u'isEnabled': True},
    {u'name': u'Alcoa Corporation',
     u'symbol': u'AA',
     u'iexId': u'12042',
     u'date': u'2018-02-12',
     u'type': u'cs',
     u'isEnabled': True},
    {u'name': u'Altaba Inc.',
     u'symbol': u'AABA', 
     u'iexId': u'7653',
     u'date': u'2018-02-12',
     u'type': u'cs',
     u'isEnabled': True},

I want to eliminate the unicode and just extract symbols out from the current list.

My code is as below

import urllib, json
url = "https://api.iextrading.com/1.0/ref-data/symbols"
response = urllib.urlopen(url)
data = json.loads(response.read())

I only manage to get one output as data[0]["symbol"] which returns 'u'A' but not in a complete list I want

Possible duplicate of [How to get string objects instead of Unicode from JSON?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/956867/how-to-get-string-objects-instead-of-unicode-from-json) — Chamath, Feb 13 '18 at 13:04
@bkollection JSON strings are Unicode. What do you hope to gain by pretending otherwise? — Josh Lee, Feb 13 '18 at 13:11

zipa · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-13T13:10:01.183

0

Just use:

output = [item['symbol'] for item in data]

EDIT:

If you know that all the 'symbol' values will be in ASCII just use:

output = [str(item['symbol']) for item in data]

Otherwise:

[item['symbol'].encode('ascii', 'ignore') for item in data]

edited Feb 13 '18 at 13:10

answered Feb 13 '18 at 13:00

zipa

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Thanks. Is it possible to eliminate the unicode `u`? – bkcollection Feb 13 '18 at 13:05
@bkcollection Yes, by switching to Python 3. – Josh Lee Feb 13 '18 at 13:08

python: extract symbol from list and eliminate unicode

1 Answers1