Reading JSON from a file?

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]

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]

Solution 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.

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?.

Solution 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.

Solution 3:

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.

Solution 4:

In python 3, we can use below method.

Read from file and convert to JSON

import json
from pprint import pprint

# Considering "json_list.json" is a json file

with open('json_list.json') as fd:
     json_data = json.load(fd)
     pprint(json_data)

with statement automatically close the opened file descriptor.

String to JSON

import json
from pprint import pprint

json_data = json.loads('{"name" : "myName", "age":24}')
pprint(json_data)

Solution 5:

To add on this, today you are able to use pandas to import json:
https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.read_json.html You may want to do a careful use of the orient parameter.