Graham Beckley

Check out the accompanying GitHub repo for this article here.

Technically, the School District of Philadelphia's budget data for the 2019 fiscal year is "open". It is, after all, made available through the district's Open Data portal and is freely available to download.

But just because data is freely available, doesn't mean it's easy to work with. That's what found out when I downloaded the zipped folder, opened it up, and found a heap of PDFs. Joy.

As a member of Code for Philly, I thought of my compatriots who might want to use school district data in their projects.

In his post about extracting data from APIs, Todd demonstrated a nice way to massage JSON into a pandas DataFrame. This method works great when our JSON response is flat, because dict.keys() only gets the keys on the first "level" of a dictionary. It gets a little trickier when our JSON starts to become nested though, as I experienced when working with Spotify's API via the Spotipy library. For example, take a look at a response from their https://api.spotify.com/v1/tracks/{id} endpoint:

import spotipy
from spotipy.oauth2 import SpotifyClientCredentials

spotify_client_id = 'YOUR_ID'
spotify_