python - Reading JSON from a file?

Question

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]

Answer 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?.