I've thought about this topic a lot recently. Many times I find myself working with API endpoints which return deeply nested JSON or XML "documents" which I have no real desire to learn their schema. (AWS and ElastiSearch)

I ended up creating a Python Library to perform key lookups on these deeply nested documents. For Example:

    >>> from nested_lookup import nested_lookup

    >>> document = [ { 'taco' : 42 } , { 'salsa' : [ { 'burrito' : { 'taco' : 69 } } ] } ]

    >>> print(nested_lookup('taco', document))
    [42, 69]

Check it out here:

* https://pypi.python.org/pypi/nested-lookup

* https://github.com/russellballestrini/nested-lookup