Python json.loads fails with `ValueError: Invalid control character at: line 1 column 33 (char 33)`

Question

I have a string like this:

s = u"""{"desc": "\u73cd\u54c1\u7f51-\u5168\u7403\u6f6e\u6d41\u5962\u54c1\u7f51\u7edc\u96f6\u552e\u5546 <br \/>\r\nhttp:\/\/www.zhenpin.com\/ <br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n200\u591a\u4e2a\u56fd\u9645\u4e00\u7ebf\u54c1\u724c\uff0c\u9876\u7ea7\u4e70\u624b\u5168\u7403\u91c7\u8d2d\uff0c100%\u6b63\u54c1\u4fdd\u969c\uff0c7\u5929\u65e0\u6761\u2026"}""" 

json.loads(s) returns error message like this:

ValueError: Invalid control character at: line 1 column 33 (char 33) 

Why does this error occur? How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

Another option, perhaps, is to use the strict=False argument

According to http://docs.python.org/2/library/json.html

"If strict is False (True is the default), then control characters will be allowed inside strings. Control characters in this context are those with character codes in the 0-31 range, including '\t' (tab), '\n', '\r' and '\0'."

For example:

json.loads(json_str, strict=False) 

Answer 2

The problem is your unicode string contains carriage returns (\r) and newlines (\n) within a string literal in the JSON data. If they were meant to be part of the string itself, they should be escaped appropriately. If they weren't meant to be part of the string, they shouldn't be in your JSON either.

If you can't fix where you got this JSON string to produce valid JSON, you could either remove the offending characters:

>>> json.loads(s.replace('\r\n', '')) 

or escape them manually:

>>> json.loads(s.replace('\r\n', '\\r\\n'))