How to index JSON by value name in python

Let’s say I pull JSON daily and after some initial indexing, what I have looks like this:

[{'CategoryId': 493, 'name': 'foo'},
 {'CategoryId': 735, 'name': 'bar'},
 {'CategoryId': 988, 'name': 'baz'},
 {'CategoryId': 1024, 'name': 'foo_foo'},
 {'CategoryId': 729, 'name': 'foo_bar'},
 {'CategoryId': 743,
  'name': 'foo_baz',
  ...}
]

And I want to access the dict where name is foo_baz.

Here is what I do now (ignore the [...] as they are just initial indexing I do to get to this point and is besides the point of the question):

(json.loads(response.text)[...][...][5])

Now this works… most of the time. Occasionally, there will be additional CategoryId that screws up my indexing, like so:

[{'CategoryId': 493, 'name': 'foo'},
 {'CategoryId': 735, 'name': 'bar'},
 {'CategoryId': 988, 'name': 'baz'},
 {'CategoryId': 1024, 'name': 'foo_foo'},
 {'CategoryId': 729, 'name': 'foo_bar'},
 {'CategoryId': 522, 'name': 'new_cat'},
 {'CategoryId': 743,
  'name': 'foo_baz',
  ...}
]

This now ruins my indexing thanks to new_cat. What I have been doing is just implementing a try except, but this becomes un-pythonic very quickly:

try:
  lists = (json.loads(response.text)[...][...][5])
except KeyError:
  lists = (json.loads(response.text)[...][...][6])
  ...

So, my question is, is there a way I can just index this json based on the value of name? something like:

(json.loads(response.text)[...][...][function where name is equal to 'foo_baz'])

>Solution :

If you need to do multiple lookups, I recommend:

lookup = {d['name']: d['CategoryId'] for d in data}

Now you can do lookup['foo_baz']. And if there’s really more data you haven’t shown us, you can store the whole dict:

lookup = {d['name']: d for d in data}

Now you can do lookup['foo_baz']['CategoryId'].