Handle JSON returned from Subprocess [closed]

I’m running a call to AWS CLI: aws ec2 describe-volumes --query Volumes[*].{ID:VolumeId} which returns json:

[
  {
    "ID": "vol-123456789101112"
  }
]

I’m calling it from python’s subprocess function:

command = subprocess.run('aws ec2 describe-volumes --query Volumes[*].{ID:VolumeId}', shell=True, capture_output=True)
output = command.stdout

Which outputs: b'[rn {rn "ID": "vol-123456789101112"rn }rn]rn'

Is there a better approach to collecting this json, then making it easier to parse and collect the individual IDs if several are returned.

Answer

subprocess returns bytes by default on Python 3. If you expect text, try adding text=True to the keyword arguments. (json will accept bytes just fine, but if you want to inspect the result before parsing it, you can easily get rid of the unnerving b prefix.)

command = subprocess.run(
     ['aws', 'ec2', 'describe-volumes', '--query', 'Volumes[*].{ID:VolumeId}'],
     check=True, text=True, capture_output=True)

Notice also the addition of check=True and the refactoring to remove the unnecessary and wasteful shell=True.