json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Question

I am trying to import a file which was saved using json.dumps and contains tweet coordinates:

{
    "type": "Point", 
    "coordinates": [
        -4.62352292, 
        55.44787441
    ]
}

My code is:

>>> import json
>>> data = json.loads('/Users/JoshuaHawley/clean1.txt')  

But each time I get the error:

json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

I want to end up extracting all the coordinates and saving them separately to a different file so they can then be mapped, but this seemingly simple problem is stopping me from doing so. I have looked at answers to similar errors but don't seem to be able to apply it to this. Any help would be appreciated as I am relatively new to python.

Answer 1

json.loads() takes a JSON encoded string, not a filename. You want to use json.load() (no s) instead and pass in an open file object:

with open('/Users/JoshuaHawley/clean1.txt') as jsonfile:
    data = json.load(jsonfile)

The open() command produces a file object that json.load() can then read from, to produce the decoded Python object for you. The with statement ensures that the file is closed again when done.

The alternative is to read the data yourself and then pass it into json.loads().

Answer 2

I had similar error: "Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)"

It helped for me to add "myfile.seek(0)", move the pointer to the 0 character

with open(storage_path, 'r') as myfile:
if len(myfile.readlines()) != 0:
    myfile.seek(0)
    Bank_0 = json.load(myfile)