Python 3 Get and parse JSON API

The only thing missing in the original question is a call to the decode method on the response object (and even then, not for every python3 version). It's a shame no one pointed that out and everyone jumped on a third party library.

Using only the standard library, for the simplest of use cases :

import json
from urllib.request import urlopen


def get(url, object_hook=None):
    with urlopen(url) as resource:  # 'with' is important to close the resource after use
        return json.load(resource, object_hook=object_hook)

Simple use case :

data = get('http://url') # '{ "id": 1, "$key": 13213654 }'
print(data['id']) # 1
print(data['$key']) # 13213654

Or if you prefer, but riskier :

from types import SimpleNamespace

data = get('http://url', lambda o: SimpleNamespace(**o)) # '{ "id": 1, "$key": 13213654 }'
print(data.id) # 1
print(data.$key) # invalid syntax
# though you can still do
print(data.__dict__['$key'])

you can use standard library python3:

import urllib.request
import json
url = 'http://www.reddit.com/r/all/top/.json'
req = urllib.request.Request(url)

##parsing response
r = urllib.request.urlopen(req).read()
cont = json.loads(r.decode('utf-8'))
counter = 0

##parcing json
for item in cont['data']['children']:
    counter += 1
    print("Title:", item['data']['title'], "\nComments:", item['data']['num_comments'])
    print("----")

##print formated
#print (json.dumps(cont, indent=4, sort_keys=True))
print("Number of titles: ", counter)

output will be like this one:

...
Title: Maybe we shouldn't let grandma decide things anymore.  
Comments: 2018
---- 
Title: Carrie Fisher and Her Stunt Double Sunbathing on the Set of Return of The Jedi, 1982  
Comments: 880
---- 
Title: fidget spinner  
Comments: 1537
---- 
Number of titles:  25

Version 1: (do a pip install requests before running the script)

import requests
r = requests.get(url='https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=pretty')
print(r.json())

Version 2: (do a pip install wget before running the script)

import wget

fs = wget.download(url='https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=pretty')
with open(fs, 'r') as f:
    content = f.read()
print(content)

I would usually use the requests package with the json package. The following code should be suitable for your needs:

import requests
import json

url = 'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json?print=pretty'
r = requests.get(url)
print(json.loads(r.content))

Output

[11008076, 
 11006915, 
 11008202,
 ...., 
 10997668,
 10999859,
 11001695]