• December 19, 2020
• in python
• 2 min read

Iterating Through the Folder Dictionary

After taking a break and coming back to it, I finally was able to iterate through the dictionary containing the folders I’ve sorted my records in to on Discogs.

Dictionaries are a basic object in Python, but my struggles show that to be good - at anything - takes practice. And I haven’t been practicing. Thank goodness for Stack Overflow!

I embedded all kinds of print statements trying to figure out how to play with the JSON from Discogs.

After lots of trial and error, Google searches and Stack Overflow searches, I’ve got it.

After making the API call to Discogs, we get the JSON back:

record_json = response.json()

json_data = record_json
json_folders = json_data[”folders”]

json_folders is a list, so we add the last line above. Now I had to make a for loop to iterate through that list - which is a list of dictionaries.

The if statement looks to see if folder - which we passed from the controller when the user clicked which kind of album they want a random answer to, matches the folder ID found in the JSON.

for get_folder_id in json_folders:
    print(json_folders)
    print(len(json_folders))

    if get_folder_id[”id”] == folder:

        lp_count = get_folder_id[”count”]
        print(”Folder passed = “, folder, ”LP Count is :”, lp_count)
        # folder_test = 2162484
        print(folder, lp_count)

Voila! From there, I get a random number between one and the count found in the JSON. That number is then passed to the pagination request to get the album ID.

Next up: Either fix the pagination method to reduce the if / else statement or move on to getting the album release information. I also need to remove a ton of print statements and clean up and remove all the methods I don’t have to use after refactoring this. Progress!