How to read/fix incorrect har file form to be read by python?

Question

With python I want to read the content of a har file, but the har file seems to be in some incorrect format. The har file I have looks like this:

"{
  \"log\": {
    \"version\": \"1.2\",
    \"creator\": {
      \"name\": \"Selenium Wire HAR dump\",
      \"version\": \"0.1\",
      \"comment\": \"Selenium Wire version 4.6.3\"
    },
    \"entries\": [
      {
        \"startedDateTime\": \"2022-03-21T15:44:16.496471+00:00\",
        \"time\": 200,
        \"request\": {
          \"method\": \"GET\",
          \"url\": \"http://sscx-portal.ocp.bbp.epfl.ch/sscx-portal/digital-reconstructions/neurons?brain_region=S1DZO&layer=L23&etype=bAC&mtype=L23_LBC&memodel=L23_LBC_bAC_2\",
          \"httpVersion\": \"HTTP/1.1\",
          \"cookies\": [],
          \"headers\": [
            {
              \"name\": \"Host\",
              \"value\": \"sscx-portal.ocp.bbp.epfl.ch\"
            },
            {
              \"name\": \"Upgrade-Insecure-Requests\",
              \"value\": \"1\"
            },
            {
              \"name\": \"User-Agent\",
              \"value\": \"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/99.0.4844.51 Safari/537.36\"
            },
            {
              \"name\": \"Accept\",
              \"value\": \"text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9\"
            },
            {
              \"name\": \"Accept-Encoding\",
              \"value\": \"gzip, deflate\"
            },
            {
              \"name\": \"Accept-Language\",
              \"value\": \"en-US,en;q=0.9\"
            }
          ],
          \"queryString\": [
            {
              \"name\": \"brain_region\",
              \"value\": \"S1DZO\"
            },
            {
              \"name\": \"layer\",
              \"value\": \"L23\"
            },
            {
              \"name\": \"etype\",
              \"value\": \"bAC\"
            },
            {
              \"name\": \"mtype\",
              \"value\": \"L23_LBC\"
            },
            {
              \"name\": \"memodel\",
              \"value\":...

and therefore I cannot read it as json.

How to convert that into json?

user_1581090 · Answer

The solution is to "un-escape" that bunch of text using ast. And then it is possible to read it as json:

with open("myfile.har") as f:
    data = json.loads(ast.literal_eval(f.read()))

print(data["log"].keys())

which give the output

dict_keys(['version', 'creator', 'entries'])

and then you can take it from there.

I advise against using haralyzer, as it does not seem maintained (still python2 syntax), and it does not work as the example shows.

How to read/fix incorrect har file form to be read by python?

1 Answers