scrape raw data from websites (accessing apis is often more convenient than downloading web pages and parsing html with beautiful soup automatically download new posts from one of your social network accounts and post them to another account for exampleyou could take your tumblr posts and post them to facebook create "movie encyclopediafor your personal movie collection by pulling data from imdbrotten tomatoesand wikipedia and putting it into single text file on your computer you can see some examples of json apis in the resources at nostarch com/automatestuff json isn' the only way to format data into human-readable string there are many othersincluding xml (extensible markup language)toml (tom' obviousminimal language)yml (yet another markup language)ini (initialization)or even the outdated asn (abstract syntax notation oneformatsall of which provide structure for representing data as human-readable text this book won' cover thesebecause json has quickly become the most widely used alternate formatbut there are third-party python modules that readily handle them the json module python' json module handles all the details of translating between string with json data and python values for the json loads(and json dumps(functions json can' store every kind of python value it can contain values of only the following data typesstringsintegersfloatsbooleanslistsdictionariesand nonetype json cannot represent python-specific objectssuch as file objectscsv reader or writer objectsregex objectsor selenium webelement objects reading json with the loads(function to translate string containing json data into python valuepass it to the json loads(function (the name means "load string,not "loads "enter the following into the interactive shellstringofjsondata '{"name""zophie""iscat"true"micecaught" "felineiq"null}import json jsondataaspythonvalue json loads(stringofjsondatajsondataaspythonvalue {'iscat'true'micecaught' 'name''zophie''felineiq'noneafter you import the json moduleyou can call loads(and pass it string of json data note that json strings always use double quotes it will return that data as python dictionary python dictionaries are not