Reading JSON from a file?

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.

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?.

The problem is using the 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.