Reading *.json from URL - json.loads() versus urllib.urlopen.readlines()

[Alister]

On Tue, 28 May 2013 08:31:35 +0100, Fábio Santos wrote:

> On 28 May 2013 04:19, "Bryan Britten" <britten.bryan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm not familiar with using read(4096), I'll have to look into that.
>> When
> I tried to just save the file, my computer just sat in limbo for some
> time and didn't seem to want to process the command.
> 
> That's just file.read with an integer argument. You can read a file by
> chunks by repeatedly calling that function until you get the empty
> string.
> 
>> Based on my *extremely* limited knowledge of JSON, that's definitely
>> the
> type of file this is. Here is a snippet of what is seen when you log in:
> ...
> That's json. It's pretty big, but not big enough to stall a slow
> computer more than half a second.
> 
> -
> 
> I've looked for documentation on that method on twitter.
> 
> It seems that it's part of the twitter streaming api.
> 
> https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis
> 
> What this means is that the requests aren't supposed to end. They are
> supposed to be read gradually, using the lines to split the response
> into meaningful chunks. That's why you can't read the data and why your
> browser never gets around to download it. Both urlopen and your browser
> block while waiting for the request to end.

Are we overlooking the obvious
why not use one of the Python twitter modules to isolate your app from 
the nitty-gritty details of the twitter stream 

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/twitter-libraries

-- 
Given sufficient time, what you put off doing today will get done by 
itself.