[python] 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]

This works for me.

json.load() accepts file object, parses the JSON data, populates a Python dictionary with the data and returns it back to you.

Suppose JSON file is like this:

{
   "emp_details":[
                 {
                "emp_name":"John",
                "emp_emailId":"[email protected]"  
                  },
                {
                 "emp_name":"Aditya",
                 "emp_emailId":"[email protected]"
                }
              ] 
}

import json 

# Opening JSON file 
f = open('data.json',) 

# returns JSON object as  
# a dictionary 
data = json.load(f) 

# Iterating through the json 
# list 
for i in data['emp_details']: 
    print(i) 

# Closing file 
f.close()

#Output:
{'emp_name':'John','emp_emailId':'[email protected]'}
{'emp_name':'Aditya','emp_emailId':'[email protected]'}

You can use pandas library to read the JSON file.

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_json('strings.json',lines=True)
print(df)

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.

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)

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.

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.