In python3.7.7, the definition of json.load is as below according to cpython source code:
def load(fp, *, cls=None, object_hook=None, parse_float=None,
parse_int=None, parse_constant=None, object_pairs_hook=None, **kw):
return loads(fp.read(),
cls=cls, object_hook=object_hook,
parse_float=parse_float, parse_int=parse_int,
parse_constant=parse_constant, object_pairs_hook=object_pairs_hook, **kw)
json.load actually calls json.loads and use fp.read() as the first argument.
So if your code is:
with open (file) as fp:
s = fp.read()
json.loads(s)
It's the same to do this:
with open (file) as fp:
json.load(fp)
But if you need to specify the bytes reading from the file as like fp.read(10) or the string/bytes you want to deserialize is not from file, you should use json.loads()
As for json.loads(), it not only deserialize string but also bytes. If s is bytes or bytearray, it will be decoded to string first. You can also find it in the source code.
def loads(s, *, encoding=None, cls=None, object_hook=None, parse_float=None,
parse_int=None, parse_constant=None, object_pairs_hook=None, **kw):
"""Deserialize ``s`` (a ``str``, ``bytes`` or ``bytearray`` instance
containing a JSON document) to a Python object.
...
"""
if isinstance(s, str):
if s.startswith('\ufeff'):
raise JSONDecodeError("Unexpected UTF-8 BOM (decode using utf-8-sig)",
s, 0)
else:
if not isinstance(s, (bytes, bytearray)):
raise TypeError(f'the JSON object must be str, bytes or bytearray, '
f'not {s.__class__.__name__}')
s = s.decode(detect_encoding(s), 'surrogatepass')