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?.

UPDATE

With Python3, you can do it in one line, using SimpleNamespace and object_hook:

import json
from types import SimpleNamespace

data = '{"name": "John Smith", "hometown": {"name": "New York", "id": 123}}'

# Parse JSON into an object with attributes corresponding to dict keys.
x = json.loads(data, object_hook=lambda d: SimpleNamespace(**d))
# Or, in Python 3.13+:
#   json.loads(data, object_hook=SimpleNamespace)
print(x.name, x.hometown.name, x.hometown.id)

OLD ANSWER (Python2)

In Python2, you can do it in one line, using namedtuple and object_hook (but it's very slow with many nested objects):

import json
from collections import namedtuple

data = '{"name": "John Smith", "hometown": {"name": "New York", "id": 123}}'

# Parse JSON into an object with attributes corresponding to dict keys.
x = json.loads(data, object_hook=lambda d: namedtuple('X', d.keys())(*d.values()))
print x.name, x.hometown.name, x.hometown.id

or, to reuse this easily:

def _json_object_hook(d): return namedtuple('X', d.keys())(*d.values())
def json2obj(data): return json.loads(data, object_hook=_json_object_hook)

x = json2obj(data)

If you want it to handle keys that aren't good attribute names, check out namedtuple's rename parameter.