Nested Data and JSON in Python

Table of Contents

1. Challenge

   Step 1: Explore the City Explorer Planner starter project

   Welcome to the City Explorer Planner lab. You will complete a small Python utility that stores trip ideas, place categories, traveler records, and a final exportable snapshot.

   The planner package is split by responsibility: itinerary.py works with nested lists, categories.py uses dictionaries with list values, profiles.py models travelers as dictionaries, and snapshot.py combines everything and serializes it with the json module. The tests directory has one pytest file per task, and main.py is an entry point you can run manually. >If you get stuck, you can refer to the provided solution code for each task, available in the solution folder.

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2. Challenge

   Step 2: Build and navigate the nested itinerary

   In this step you will group activity lists into a nested structure, retrieve a specific value by index, and flatten the whole collection for reporting. All three tasks live in planner/itinerary.py.

3. Challenge

   Step 3: Organize place recommendations by category

   In this step you will store lists of place names inside a dictionary, format its contents by iterating with items(), and add a safe case-insensitive lookup. All three tasks live in planner/categories.py.

4. Challenge

   Step 4: Model travelers with dictionaries

   In this step you will represent travelers as dictionaries, generate readable summaries from their fields, and map that formatting over a list of profiles. All three tasks live in planner/profiles.py.

5. Challenge

   Step 5: Create the final snapshot and export it

   In this final step you will combine all planner data into one snapshot dictionary, serialize it as JSON, and compute totals from the nested structures. All three tasks live in planner/snapshot.py.

6. Challenge

   Step 6: Run the planner

   All functions are complete. In the terminal, run:

   python main.py
   

   You should see the itinerary, category map, traveler summaries, JSON snapshot, and totals printed with no errors. Congratulations on completing the lab! In this project, you built a city trip planner that outputs a nested itinerary, formatted category listings, traveler summaries, and a serialized JSON snapshot, all printed cleanly from a single main.py entry point. Along the way, you practiced working with nested lists and dictionaries, safe index lookups, dictionary iteration with items(), and list manipulation using extend(). You also modeled real-world data as Python dictionaries, transformed collections of records into readable summaries, and used json.dumps to serialize a complex nested structure into a portable, deterministic JSON string.