I am trying to do 2 things with Python-

1. Execute a command at the terminal
2. Save the output of the above command to a variable.

This is my code till now -

import subprocess
ip_address = "http://ipwho.is/104.123.204.11"
query_reply = subprocess.run(["curl" , ip_address])
print("The exit code was: %d" % query_reply.returncode)

The query_reply only saves the return code as I am using query_reply.returncode. Whereas I want to save the general output of the command curl http://ipwho.is/104.123.204.11 to a variable.

This output is a dict-like structure -

{"ip":"104.123.204.11","success":true,"type":"IPv4","continent":"North America","continent_code":"NA","country":"United States","country_code":"US","region":"California","region_code":"CA","city":"San Jose","latitude":37.3382082,"longitude":-121.8863286,"is_eu":false,"postal":"95113","calling_code":"1","capital":"Washington D.C.","borders":"CA,MX","flag":{"img":"https:\/\/cdn.ipwhois.io\/flags\/us.svg","emoji":"\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8","emoji_unicode":"U 1F1FA U 1F1F8"},"connection":{"asn":16625,"org":"Akamai Technologies, Inc.","isp":"Akamai Technologies, Inc.","domain":"gwu.edu"},"timezone":{"id":"America\/Los_Angeles","abbr":"PDT","is_dst":true,"offset":-25200,"utc":"-07:00","current_time":"2022-07-25T11:26:47-07:00"}}

The final goal is to access the fields like the region, city etc. inside the above structure. What is the general process to approach this sort of problem?

CodePudding user response：

there is an arg to get output

import subprocess
import json

r = subprocess.run(["curl" , "http://ipwho.is/104.123.204.11"], capture_output=True)
djson = json.loads(r.stdout.decode())
djson["region"], djson["city"]

or better just querying it

import requests

with requests.get("http://ipwho.is/104.123.204.11") as response:
    djson = response.json()
djson["region"], djson["city"]

CodePudding user response：

You can use subprocess.check_output, which returns the subprocess output as a string:

import subprocess
import json

raw = subprocess.check_output(["curl", "http://ipwho.is/104.123.204.11"])
data = json.loads(raw)
print(data)

Although this works, it's rarely if ever a good idea to shell out to curl to retrieve a URL in Python. Instead, use the excellent requests library to get the URL directly:

import requests

req = requests.get("http://ipwho.is/104.123.204.11")
req.raise_for_status()
data = req.json()
print(data)

This is simpler, handles errors better (raise_for_status will raise an easy-to-understand exception if the server returns an error code), faster, and does not depend on the curl program being present.

(Note: although similar to the other answer, the code snippets in this answer should work directly without modification).