What's the best way to parse a JSON response from the requests library?

Since you're using requests, you should use the response's json method.

import requests

response = requests.get(...)
data = response.json()

It autodetects which decoder to use.

You can use json.loads:

import json
import requests

response = requests.get(...)
json_data = json.loads(response.text)

This converts a given string into a dictionary which allows you to access your JSON data easily within your code.

Or you can use @Martijn's helpful suggestion, and the higher voted answer, response.json().

You can use the json response as dictionary directly:

import requests

res = requests.get('https://reqres.in/api/users?page=2')
print(f'Total users: {res.json().get("total")}')

or you can hold the json content as dictionary:

json_res = res.json()

and from this json_res dictionary variable, you can extract any value of your choice

json_res.get('total')
json_res["total"]

Attentions Because this is a dictionary, you should keep your eye on the key spelling and the case, i.e. 'total' is not the same as 'Total'

What's the best way to parse a JSON response from the requests library?

The top answers show seemingly two different ways to parse a json response into a Python object but they are essentially the same.

response.json() differs in two places:

• it uses simplejson (which is the externally maintained development version of the json library included with Python) if it's installed in your environment, but uses the built-in json if not (source). I think there used to be a performance difference between json and simplejson in the past (when Python 2 was still widely used) but there's almost no difference between the libraries anymore.
• if the response doesn't have an encoding (response.encoding is None), then it tries to guess it and try to decode using the guessed encoding (source).

So in 99.9999% of cases, response.json() and json.loads(response.text) will produce the same dictionary. It may differ if the source json has some weird encoding.