Reading JSON from a file?

Question

I am getting a bit of headache just because a simple looking, easy statement is throwing some errors in my face.

I have a json file called strings.json like this:

"strings": [{"-name": "city", "#text": "City"}, {"-name": "phone", "#text": "Phone"}, ...,             {"-name": "address", "#text": "Address"}] 

I want to read the json file, just that for now. I have these statements which I found out, but it's not working:

import json from pprint import pprint  with open('strings.json') as json_data:     d = json.loads(json_data)     json_data.close()     pprint(d) 

The error displayed on the console was this:

Traceback (most recent call last):   File "/home/.../android/values/manipulate_json.py", line 5, in <module>     d = json.loads(json_data)   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 [Finished in 0.1s with exit code 1] 

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If I use json.load instead of json.loads, I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):   File "/home/.../android/values/manipulate_json.py", line 5, in <module>     d = json.load(json_data)   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 278, in load     **kw)   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 369, in decode     raise ValueError(errmsg("Extra data", s, end, len(s))) ValueError: Extra data: line 829 column 1 - line 829 column 2 (char 18476 - 18477) [Finished in 0.1s with exit code 1] 

Answer 1

The json.load() method (without "s" in "load") can read a file directly:

import json  with open('strings.json') as f:     d = json.load(f)     print(d) 

You were using the json.loads() method, which is used for string arguments only.

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The error you get with json.loads is a totally different problem. In that case, there is some invalid json in that file. For that, I would recommend running the file through a json validator.

There are also solutions for fixing json like for example How do I automatically fix an invalid JSON string?

Answer 2

Here is a copy of code which works fine for me

import json  with open("test.json") as json_file:     json_data = json.load(json_file)     print(json_data) 

with the data

{     "a": [1,3,"asdf",true],     "b": {         "Hello": "world"     } } 

you may want to wrap your json.load line with a try catch because invalid JSON will cause a stacktrace error message.