import urllib url = 'https://api.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opennames/v1/nearest?%s' params = urllib.urlencode({'point':'437342.5,115485.5', 'key':'wLFnRmX8mmjwob5ptbnkjaZfuNVKN3WA'}) try: f = urllib.urlopen(url % params) except Exception as e: print(str(e)) response = f.read() print('RESPONSE:', response) for line in response.splitlines(): word_lst = line.split(':') for word in word_lst: if '"NAME1" ' in word: print(line) if 'GEOMETRY' in word: print(line) if 'ID' in word: print(line) f.close()