Displaying better error message than "No JSON object could be decoded"

Question

I've found that the simplejson module gives more descriptive errors in many cases where the built-in json module is vague. For instance, for the case of having a comma after the last item in a list:

json.loads('[1,2,]')
....
ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded

which is not very descriptive. The same operation with simplejson:

simplejson.loads('[1,2,]')
...
simplejson.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting object: line 1 column 5 (char 5)

Much better! Likewise for other common errors like capitalizing True.

You wont be able to get python to tell you where the JSON is incorrect. You will need to use a linter online somewhere like this

This will show you error in the JSON you are trying to decode.

You could try the rson library found here: http://code.google.com/p/rson/ . I it also up on PYPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rson/0.9 so you can use easy_install or pip to get it.

for the example given by tom:

>>> rson.loads('[1,2,]')
...
rson.base.tokenizer.RSONDecodeError: Unexpected trailing comma: line 1, column 6, text ']'

RSON is a designed to be a superset of JSON, so it can parse JSON files. It also has an alternate syntax which is much nicer for humans to look at and edit. I use it quite a bit for input files.

As for the capitalizing of boolean values: it appears that rson reads incorrectly capitalized booleans as strings.

>>> rson.loads('[true,False]')
[True, u'False']

I had a similar problem and it was due to singlequotes. The JSON standard(http://json.org) talks only about using double quotes so it must be that the python json library supports only double quotes.

For my particular version of this problem, I went ahead and searched the function declaration of load_json_file(path) within the packaging.py file, then smuggled a print line into it:

def load_json_file(path):
    data = open(path, 'r').read()
    print data
    try:
        return Bunch(json.loads(data))
    except ValueError, e:
        raise MalformedJsonFileError('%s when reading "%s"' % (str(e),
                                                               path))

That way it would print the content of the json file before entering the try-catch, and that way – even with my barely existing Python knowledge – I was able to quickly figure out why my configuration couldn't read the json file.
(It was because I had set up my text editor to write a UTF-8 BOM … stupid)

Just mentioning this because, while maybe not a good answer to the OP's specific problem, this was a rather quick method in determining the source of a very oppressing bug. And I bet that many people will stumble upon this article who are searching a more verbose solution for a MalformedJsonFileError: No JSON object could be decoded when reading …. So that might help them.