Single vs double quotes in JSON

Question

JSON syntax is not Python syntax. JSON requires double quotes for its strings.

you can use ast.literal_eval()

>>> import ast
>>> s = "{'username':'dfdsfdsf'}"
>>> ast.literal_eval(s)
{'username': 'dfdsfdsf'}

You can dump JSON with double quote by:

import json

# mixing single and double quotes
data = {'jsonKey': 'jsonValue',"title": "hello world"}

# get string with all double quotes
json_string = json.dumps(data) 

demjson is also a good package to solve the problem of bad json syntax:

pip install demjson

Usage:

from demjson import decode
bad_json = "{'username':'dfdsfdsf'}"
python_dict = decode(bad_json)

Edit:

demjson.decode is a great tool for damaged json, but when you are dealing with big amourt of json data ast.literal_eval is a better match and much faster.

Two issues with answers given so far, if , for instance, one streams such non-standard JSON. Because then one might have to interpret an incoming string (not a python dictionary).

Issue 1 - demjson: With Python 3.7.+ and using conda I wasn't able to install demjson since obviosly it does not support Python >3.5 currently. So I need a solution with simpler means, for instance astand/or json.dumps.

Issue 2 - ast & json.dumps: If a JSON is both single quoted and contains a string in at least one value, which in turn contains single quotes, the only simple yet practical solution I have found is applying both:

In the following example we assume line is the incoming JSON string object :

>>> line = str({'abc':'008565','name':'xyz','description':'can control TV\'s and more'})

Step 1: convert the incoming string into a dictionary using ast.literal_eval()
Step 2: apply json.dumps to it for the reliable conversion of keys and values, but without touching the contents of values:

>>> import ast
>>> import json
>>> print(json.dumps(ast.literal_eval(line)))
{"abc": "008565", "name": "xyz", "description": "can control TV's and more"}

json.dumps alone would not do the job because it does not interpret the JSON, but only see the string. Similar for ast.literal_eval(): although it interprets correctly the JSON (dictionary), it does not convert what we need.

You can fix it that way:

s = "{'username':'dfdsfdsf'}"
j = eval(s)

As said, JSON is not Python syntax. You need to use double quotes in JSON. Its creator is (in-)famous for using strict subsets of allowable syntax to ease programmer cognitive overload.

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Below can fail if one of the JSON strings itself contains a single quote as pointed out by @Jiaaro. DO NOT USE. Left here as an example of what does not work.

It is really useful to know that there are no single quotes in a JSON string. Say, you copied and pasted it from a browser console/whatever. Then, you can just type

a = json.loads('very_long_json_string_pasted_here')

This might otherwise break if it used single quotes, too.