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stackoverflow.com › questions › 20199126 › reading-json-from-a-file

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?.

Answer from ubomb on Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow

stackoverflow.com › questions › 20199126 › reading-json-from-a-file

python - Reading JSON from a file - Stack Overflow

Top answer

1 of 7

1085

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.

There are also solutions for fixing JSON like for example How do I automatically fix an invalid JSON string?.

2 of 7

135

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.

GeeksforGeeks

geeksforgeeks.org › python › read-json-file-using-python

Read JSON file using Python - GeeksforGeeks

07:39

In particular, loads() and load() are used to read JSON from strings and files, respectively. json.dumps(obj, indent=4): converts the Python object back to a JSON string with 4-space indentation.

Published September 15, 2025

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