In dictionary, how to decipher entry that contains curly brackets, backslashes, and quotes-CodePudding

I was looking through a JSON file that contained multiple dictionary entries similar to the one below. I am in python and cannot find a way to decipher this, and cannot find anything on Google about this. It seems to me to be another dictionary, inside a string, with backslashes. I'm sorry I can't be more descriptive as I am not even sure what to call this.

{"restrictions":"[{\"type\":\"whitelist\",\"firstFilter\":{\"finder\":\"Criteria\",\"minimum\":\"800000\"}}]"}

I want to know what type of entry this is called or how I can decode it.

CodePudding user response：

{
    "restrictions": "[
        {
            \"type\": \"whitelist\",
            \"firstFilter\": {
                 \"finder\":\"Criteria\",
                 \"minimum\":\"800000\"
            }
        }
    ]"
}

This is a JSON object, inside it there is a string that contains JSON.

In Python you can decode it with the json library, in this case with json.loads().

>>> my_dict = {"restrictions":"[{\"type\":\"whitelist\",\"firstFilter\":{\"finder\":\"Criteria\",\"minimum\":\"800000\"}}]"}
>>> my_json_string = my_dict["restrictions"]
>>> import json
>>> json.loads(my_json_string)

Try this, it should work, the result is:

[{'type': 'whitelist', 'firstFilter': {'finder': 'Criteria', 'minimum': '800000'}}]

It seems to me to be another dictionary, inside a string, with backslashes

The backslashes are used to escape some characters, not only in JSON:

>>> "And they said: "Hello!"" # This will give you an error
>>> "And they said: \"Hello!\"" # This is ok