Copyimport json

array = '{"fruits": ["apple", "banana", "orange"]}'
data  = json.loads(array)
print(data['fruits']) 
# the print displays:
# ['apple', 'banana', 'orange']

You had everything you needed. data will be a dict, and data['fruits'] will be a list

Copyjson_data = [] # your list with json objects (dicts)

with open('prueba.json') as json_file:
   json_data = json.load(json_file)

for item in json_data:
    for data_item in item['data']:
        print data_item['name'], data_item['value']

If the first character is "[" then the json file should indeed be parsed as a list. For example,

a_list = json.loads("[ 'a', 'b', 'c' ] ")   # should give list [a,b,c]
a_dict = json.loads("{ 'data' : ['a', 'b', 'c']} ") # gives a dict

print(type(a_list), type(a_dict)) # should be list, dict
a_dict['data']  # can look up the field in this dict

As for your second issue: if you want to iterate over items (first item of a_list above is the item "a") then keep it as a list. If you want to iterate over characters (the first character of json.dumps(a_list) is "["), then you convert it to a string first.

You do not need to convert the json back to a string to iterate over it, and can just do

for item in a_list:
    print(item)

Edit: For your data in particular, you can access fields as follows:

with open (r'c:\eseek\limitsdata.json') as f:
   data = json.load(f)

print( data[0]["Model"] ) # prints '500'
print( data[1]["Task"] ) # prints ' 71-00-00-200-802'

You're trying to read the string "data.txt". What you want is to open and read the file.

import json

with open('data.txt', 'r') as data_file:
    json_data = data_file.read()

data = json.loads(json_data)

with open ('movies.txt', 'r') as f:
    if f.read() != '':
        movies = json.load(f)

Since f is essentially a generator, calling f.read() in the if condition consumes it, and by the time json.load(f) is called f is empty:

with open ('movies.txt') as f:
        print(f.read())
        # file content
        print(f.read())
        # ''

You have to store the file's content in a variable and then use json.loads:

with open('movies.txt') as f:
    content = f.read()
    if content:
        movies = json.loads(content)

In your for loop statement, Each item in json_array is a dictionary and the dictionary does not have a key store_details. So I modified the program a little bit

import json

input_file = open ('stores-small.json')
json_array = json.load(input_file)
store_list = []

for item in json_array:
    store_details = {"name":None, "city":None}
    store_details['name'] = item['name']
    store_details['city'] = item['city']
    store_list.append(store_details)

print(store_list)