What’s the best way to load a JSONObject from a json text file?

Thanks @Kit Ho for your answer. I used your code and found that I kept running into errors where my InputStream was always null and ClassNotFound exceptions when the JSONObject was being created. Here's my version of your code which does the trick for me:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.InputStream;
import org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils;

import org.json.JSONObject;
public class JSONParsing {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        File f = new File("file.json");
        if (f.exists()){
            InputStream is = new FileInputStream("file.json");
            String jsonTxt = IOUtils.toString(is, "UTF-8");
            System.out.println(jsonTxt);
            JSONObject json = new JSONObject(jsonTxt);       
            String a = json.getString("1000");
            System.out.println(a);   
        }
    }
}

I found this answer to be enlightening about the difference between FileInputStream and getResourceAsStream. Hope this helps someone else too.

try this:

import net.sf.json.JSONObject;
import net.sf.json.JSONSerializer;
import org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils; 

    public class JsonParsing {

        public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
            InputStream is = 
                    JsonParsing.class.getResourceAsStream( "sample-json.txt");
            String jsonTxt = IOUtils.toString( is );

            JSONObject json = (JSONObject) JSONSerializer.toJSON( jsonTxt );        
            double coolness = json.getDouble( "coolness" );
            int altitude = json.getInt( "altitude" );
            JSONObject pilot = json.getJSONObject("pilot");
            String firstName = pilot.getString("firstName");
            String lastName = pilot.getString("lastName");

            System.out.println( "Coolness: " + coolness );
            System.out.println( "Altitude: " + altitude );
            System.out.println( "Pilot: " + lastName );
        }
    }

and this is your sample-json.txt , should be in json format

{
 'foo':'bar',
 'coolness':2.0,
 'altitude':39000,
 'pilot':
     {
         'firstName':'Buzz',
         'lastName':'Aldrin'
     },
 'mission':'apollo 11'
}

With java 8 you can try this:

import org.json.JSONException;
import org.json.JSONObject;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Paths;

public class JSONUtil {

    public static JSONObject parseJSONFile(String filename) throws JSONException, IOException {
        String content = new String(Files.readAllBytes(Paths.get(filename)));
        return new JSONObject(content);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, JSONException {
        String filename = "path/to/file/abc.json";
        JSONObject jsonObject = parseJSONFile(filename);

        //do anything you want with jsonObject
    }
}