On these pages: https://ci.jenkins-ci.org/api/
The instructions for using Python say: > Access the same data as Python for Python clients. This can be parsed into > Python object as eval(urllib.urlopen("...").read()) and the resulting > object tree is identical to that of JSON. However, when you do this, beware > of the security implication. If you are connecting to a non-trusted > Jenkins, the server can send you malicious Python programs. > > In Python 2.6 or later you can safely parse this output using > ast.literal_eval(urllib.urlopen("...").read()) > Actually, in Python 2.6 or later, the best way for reading these responses is to use the regular JSON API, and use the (new in 2.6) json module to read them: json.loads(urllib.urlopen("...").read()) Not only does this make more sense -- it's also faster (in my test with the above URL, about 5 times faster). So -- the Python-specific API is only for those who use Python <2.6 and don't care about security (if they do care, there are 3rd party JSON parsers). Noam.