Reading JSON from a file

Question

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] ``` If I use `json.l…

Accepted Answer

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.

The error you get with `json.loads` is a totally different problem. In that case, there is some invalid JSON content 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?.

Reading JSON from a file

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