Locating a dynamic string in a text file - file

Question

Problem:
Hello, I have been struggling recently in my programming endeavours. I have managed to receive the output below from Google Speech to Text, but I cannot figure out how draw data from this block.
Excerpt 1:
[VoiceMain]: Successfully initialized
{"result":[]}
{"result":[{"alternative":[{"transcript":"hello","confidence":0.46152416},{"transcript":"how low"},{"transcript":"how lo"},{"transcript":"how long"},{"transcript":"Polo"}],"final":true}],"result_index":0}
[VoiceMain]: Successfully initialized
{"result":[]}
{"result":[{"alternative":[{"transcript":"hello"},{"transcript":"how long"},{"transcript":"how low"},{"transcript":"howlong"}],"final":true}],"result_index":0}
Objective:
My goal is to extract the string "hello" (without the quotation marks) from the first transcript of each block and set it equal to a variable. The problem arises when I do not know what the phrase will be. Instead of "hello", the phrase may be a string of any length. Even if it is a different string, I would still like to set it to the same variable to which the phrase "hello" would have been set to.
Furthermore, I would like to extract the number after the word "confidence". In this case, it is 0.46152416. Data type does not matter for the confidence variable. The confidence variable appears to be more difficult to extract from the blocks because it may or may not be present. If it is not present, it must be ignored. If it is present however, it must be detected and stored as a variable.
Also please note that this text block is stored within a file named "CurlOutput.txt".
All help or advice related to solving this problem is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You could do this with regex, but then I am assuming you will want to use this as a dict later in your code. So here is a python approach to building this result as a dictionary.
import json
with open('CurlOutput.txt') as f:
lines = f.read().splitlines()
flag = '{"result":[]} '
for line in lines: # Loop through each lin in file
if flag in line: # check if this is a line with data on it
results = json.loads(line.replace(flag, ''))['result'] # Load data as a dict
# If you just want to change first index of alternative
# results[0]['alternative'][0]['transcript'] = 'myNewString'
# If you want to check all alternative for confidence and transcript
for result in results[0]['alternative']: # Loop over each alternative
transcript = result['transcript']
confidence = None
if 'confidence' in result:
confidence = result['confidence']
# now do whatever you want with confidence and transcript.