I’m using the python requests module to send a RESTful GET to a server, for which I get a response in JSON. The JSON response is basically just a list of lists.

What’s the best way to coerce the response to a native Python object so I can either iterate or print it out using pprint?

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().

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.