errors with json.loads

[Bill]

Interesting problem, John.

I have probably even less experience with json than you do, so I'm 
taking this as an opportunity to learn with you.

Suggestions:

1. Try your example with Python 2 rather than Python 3.
2. Take your file and make it into a string literal in your program, and 
try calling json.loads with that as an argument.

Share with us what happens!

Good luck,
Bill


john polo wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I am using IPython 6.1.0 with Python 3.6.2 on a Windows 7 machine. I 
> am not a programmer. I am using a book called Python Data Analytics to 
> try to learn some of Python. I am at a section for reading and writing 
> JSON data. The example JSON file is:
>
>
> Listing 5-13.  books.json
> [{"writer": "Mark Ross",
>  "nationality": "USA",
>  "books": [
>          {"title": "XML Cookbook", "price": 23.56},
>          {"title": "Python Fundamentals", "price": 50.70},
>          {"title": "The NumPy library", "price": 12.30}
>              ]
> },
> {"writer": "Barbara Bracket",
>  "nationality": "UK",
>  "books": [
>          {"title": "Java Enterprise", "price": 28.60},
>          {"title": "HTML5", "price": 31.35},
>          {"title": "Python for Dummies", "price": 28.00}
>              ]
> }]
>
> and the example code for reading the file is:
>
> >>> file = open('books.json','r')
> >>> text = file.read()
> >>> text = json.loads(text)
>
> When I use those 3 lines, I get the following:
>
> JSONDecodeError                           Traceback (most recent call 
> last)
> <ipython-input-22-7aafd41f326e> in <module>()
> ----> 1 text = json.loads(text)
>
> c:\users\..\python\python36\lib\json\__init__.py in loads(s, encoding, 
> cls, object_hook, parse_float, parse_int, parse_constant, 
> object_pairs_hook, **kw)
>     352             parse_int is None and parse_float is None and
>     353             parse_constant is None and object_pairs_hook is 
> None and not kw):
> --> 354         return _default_decoder.decode(s)
>     355     if cls is None:
>     356         cls = JSONDecoder
>
> c:\users\..\python\python36\lib\json\decoder.py in decode(self, s, _w)
>     337
>     338         """
> --> 339         obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
>     340         end = _w(s, end).end()
>     341         if end != len(s):
>
> c:\users\..\python\python36\lib\json\decoder.py in raw_decode(self, s, 
> idx)
>     353         """
>     354         try:
> --> 355             obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx)
>     356         except StopIteration as err:
>     357             raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, 
> err.value) from None
>
> JSONDecodeError: Expecting ':' delimiter: line 5 column 50 (char 161)
>
> ?json.loads says that the method is for deserializing "s", with "s" 
> being a string, bytes, or bytearray.
>
> In [24]: type(text)
> Out[24]: str
>
> So "text" seems to be a string. Why does json.loads return an error?
>
>
> John
>