JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It looks a lot like the representation of nested dictionaries and lists in python when we write them out as literals in a program, but with a few small differences (e.g., the word null instead of None). When your program receives a JSON-formatted string, generally you will want to convert it into a python object, a list or a dictionary.
The other function we will use is dumps. It does the inverse of loads. It takes a python object, typically a dictionary or a list, and returns a string, in JSON format. It has a few other parameters. Two useful parameters are sort_keys and indent. When the value True is passed for the sort_keys parameter, the keys of dictionaries are output in alphabetic order with their values. The indent parameter expects an integer. When it is provided, dumps generates a string suitable for displaying to people, with newlines and indentation for nested lists or dictionaries. For example, the following function uses json.dumps to make a human-readable printout of a nested data structure.
Because we can only write strings into a file, if we wanted to convert a dictionary d into a json-formatted string so that we could store it in a file, what would we use?
