'module' object has no attribute 'loads' while parsing JSON using python

Question

I am trying to parse JSON from Python. I recently started working with Python so I followed some stackoverflow tutorial how to parse JSON using Python and I came up with below code -

#!/usr/bin/python import json  j = json.loads('{"script":"#!/bin/bash echo Hello World"}') print j['script'] 

But whenever I run the above code, I always get this error -

Traceback (most recent call last):   File "json.py", line 2, in <module>     import json   File "/cygdrive/c/ZookPython/json.py", line 4, in <module>     j = json.loads('{"script":"#!/bin/bash echo Hello World"}') AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'loads' 

Any thoughts what wrong I am doing here? I am running cygwin in windows and from there only I am running my python program. I am using Python 2.7.3

And is there any better and efficient way of parsing the JSON as well?

Update:-

Below code doesn't work if I remove the single quote since I am getting JSON string from some other method -

#!/usr/bin/python  import json  jsonStr = {"script":"#!/bin/bash echo Hello World"}  j = json.loads(jsonStr) shell_script = j['script'] print shell_script 

So before deserializing how to make sure, it has single quote as well?

This is the error I get -

Traceback (most recent call last):   File "jsontest.py", line 7, in <module>     j = json.loads(jsonStr)   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 326, in loads     return _default_decoder.decode(s)   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 366, in decode     obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end()) TypeError: expected string or buffer 

Answer 1

File "json.py", line 2, in <module>   import json 

This line is a giveaway: you have named your script "json", but you are trying to import the builtin module called "json", since your script is in the current directory, it comes first in sys.path, and so that's the module that gets imported.

You need to rename your script to something else, preferrably not a standard python module.

Answer 2

It looks like you have a json.py module which is not part of the Standard Library. Not sure what ZookPython is. Try renaming ZookPython directory (or just json.py) and re-run.