Python load json file with UTF-8 BOM header

Question

I needed to parse files generated by other tool, which unconditionally outputs json file with UTF-8 BOM header (EFBBBF). I soon found that this was the problem, as Python 2.7 module can't seem to parse it:

>>> import json >>> data = json.load(open('sample.json'))  ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded 

Removing BOM, solves it, but I wonder if there is another way of parsing json file with BOM header?

Answer 1

You can open with codecs:

import json import codecs  json.load(codecs.open('sample.json', 'r', 'utf-8-sig')) 

or decode with utf-8-sig yourself and pass to loads:

json.loads(open('sample.json').read().decode('utf-8-sig'))