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up vote 75 down vote favorite
28

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 spitted 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]

EDITED

Changed from json.loads to json.load

and got this:

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]
share|improve this question
2  
Are you sure that the file contains valid JSON? – Explosion Pills Nov 25 '13 at 17:16
1  
possible duplicate of Parsing values from a JSON file in Python – Pureferret May 19 '15 at 9:39
up vote 90 down vote accepted

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

import json

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

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

Edit: The new message 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?.

share|improve this answer
1  
hm...I changed from json.loads to json.load but I get that nice msg. – Doug Nov 25 '13 at 17:23
3  
Ah, well the new message 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. – ubomb Nov 25 '13 at 17:26
2  
got it! The file was missing EOF. The file was not correctly ended. I wouldn't notice that if it wasn't your good recommendation! Thanks! – Doug Nov 25 '13 at 17:32
1  
ubomb, if you can change you answer to me to mark it as accepted. Be free! I'll mark it. – Doug Nov 25 '13 at 17:33
1  
@Doug Done. Thanks! – ubomb Nov 25 '13 at 17:35
up vote 81 down vote

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.

share|improve this answer
up vote 26 down vote

The problem is using with statement:

with open('strings.json') as json_data:
    d = json.load(json_data)
    pprint(d)

The file is going to be implicitly closed already. There is no need to call json_data.close() again.

share|improve this answer
1  
Please remove the json_data.close(). As mentioned, it will be called implicitly. – Bonnie Varghese Nov 22 '14 at 7:31
1  
Thanks @BonnieVarghese for pointing out. I corrected above – Zongjun Dec 2 '14 at 20:28
1  
@Zongjun : Please correct loads to json.load(json_data). – Knight71 May 18 '15 at 15:28
1  
to pretty-print, I had to use: print(json.dumps(d,sort_keys=True,indent=2)) – Mike D Mar 14 at 22:46

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