pandas read_json: "If using all scalar values, you must pass an index"

Question

I have some difficulty in importing a JSON file with pandas.

import pandas as pd map_index_to_word = pd.read_json('people_wiki_map_index_to_word.json') 

This is the error that I get:

ValueError: If using all scalar values, you must pass an index 

The file structure is simplified like this:

{"biennials": 522004, "lb915": 116290, "shatzky": 127647, "woode": 174106, "damfunk": 133206, "nualart": 153444, "hatefillot": 164111, "missionborn": 261765, "yeardescribed": 161075, "theoryhe": 521685} 

It is from the machine learning course of University of Washington on Coursera. You can find the file here.

Answer 1

Try

ser = pd.read_json('people_wiki_map_index_to_word.json', typ='series') 

That file only contains key value pairs where values are scalars. You can convert it to a dataframe with ser.to_frame('count').

You can also do something like this:

import json with open('people_wiki_map_index_to_word.json', 'r') as f:     data = json.load(f) 

Now data is a dictionary. You can pass it to a dataframe constructor like this:

df = pd.DataFrame({'count': data}) 

Answer 2

You can do as @ayhan mention which will give you a column base format

Or you can enclose the object in [ ] (source) as shown below to give you a row format that will be convenient if you are loading multiple values and planing on using matrix for your machine learning models.

df = pd.DataFrame([data])