The syntax has a bit of a learning curve, but there's a library called glom that can be helpful in parsing heterogeneous JSON. Specifically it has a coalesce op

The syntax has a bit of a learning curve, but there's a library called glom that can be helpful in parsing heterogeneous JSON. Specifically it has a coalesce operator that let's you define multiple paths to get the data you are trying to get at, with a default value if none of the paths are valid. https://glom.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api.html#defaults-with-coalesce https://glom.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api.html#defaults-with... e.g. target = [{"a": {"b": "c"}}, {"a": {"c": "e"}}, {"a": {}}] results = glom(target, [Coalesce("a.b", "a.c", default="")]) # -> ["c", "e", ""]