Cannot open a json file I am creating inside a function

September 25, 2022

I am trying to obtain a json file from this function, that is filled with items from the data variable. This variable data should then be dumped into the "hero_stats.json" file and I ought to open it for visualizing in the end. What is going wrong here? I can see all variables and names matching each others, am I missing some kind of call to open the file?

import pandas as pd, requests, json


# get updated info on game heroes

def get_hero_stats():
    data = requests.get("https://api.opendota.com/api/heroStats").json()
    pd.DataFrame(data).to_json("hero_stats.json")
    with open('hero_stats.json', 'w') as outfile:
        json.dump(data, outfile)


get_hero_stats()

I get no errors from this, just a message in the end with

Process finished with exit code 0

>Solution :

The function is returning None. You need to explicitly return a value, and assign it to something if you want to use it later.

import pandas as pd
import requests


# get updated info on game heroes

def get_hero_stats():
    data = requests.get("https://api.opendota.com/api/heroStats").json()
    pd.DataFrame(data).to_json("hero_stats.json")
    return data

data = get_hero_stats()
# Do stuff with data

Also there is no need to write the data twice, so I removed the second write operation…