Load an empty string as a JSON in Python3

Question

I can not use an empty string in json.loads().

Python 3.6.4 (default, Jan  5 2018, 02:13:53) 
[GCC 7.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import json
>>> json.loads('')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/json/__init__.py", line 354, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/json/decoder.py", line 339, in decode
    obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/json/decoder.py", line 357, in raw_decode
    raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Is there a way to prevent the JSDONDecodeError and just return a default value (e.g. empty dict, list or None)? if json.loads() handle an empty string?

The background of my question is I read file contents and parse them with json.loads. But sometimes the files are empty (size=0). This is ok and not an error. But I don't want to check the file size or content size before using json.loads().

Answer 1

Use coalescing to pass it something valid.

json.loads('' or 'null')