Your json seem to be a list containing to objects (that could be described as students I guess) - file.json [ { "Name": "Steel", "StudentID": 3458274, "Tuition": 24.99 }, { "Name": "Joe", "StudentID": 5927592, "Tuition": 14.99 } ] with open('file.json', mode='r') as f: data = json.load(f) data variable now contains the content of the json file as a python list of dicts Edit: Also, I noticed that your json missing some commas (as is in your post) so it will come out as invalid and your python program gonna crash trying to parse it More on reddit.com

JSON is a file format that uses a key - value pair syntax. Keys can only be unicode strings surrounded by doubel quotes, like "name". Values can be: Only certain number formats like 5, -5, 5.5, 1.0E+5 The values true, false, and null Unicode strings in double quotes, like "hello" Array: an ordered, comma separated list of any valid value type Object: a collection of key-value pairs that itself confirms to the JSON syntax ---------------------------------- A Python dict is an object that can have any hashable object as a key. It’s more flexible. A number, a decimal, a string, a tuple, etc can be a key. A Python dict value has no limits (that I know of). It can be any Python object. A string, a number, a function, another dict, a whole entire module. You name it. ---------------------------------- What makes JSON so powerful is that it's an agreed upon format. No matter if you're using Python, Java, PHP, or Ruby, if someone sends your app data in the JSON format, the shape is predictable so your programming language of choice will be able to parse it. How Java, Python, JavaScript, etc. decide to parse JSON into an object will be a little different depending on the language. Python can decode a string or file that confirms to the JSON format into a Python dict. ---------------------------------- One nuance that I wanted to point out is even though JSON stands for "JavaScript Object Notation", it is NOT JavaScript. JSON is a file format/data exchange format. Someone said "So 1 and 1.0 are two different values in Python, while in JSON, they would be the same." That's not quite true. JSON is only a format. 1 and 1.0 in a json file are no more "the same" as 1 and 1.0 are in a txt file. What that person probably meant is that 1 and 1.0 are the same in JavaScript, but that's besides the point because it's important to remember that JSON is NOT JavaScript, it's a format. More on reddit.com

Json.dumps will convert the dictionary to a string but the string is valid JSON. You see the single quotes since Python is indicating this is a string (and double quotes is being used internally). More on reddit.com

Your problem is not appending strings/jsons to a file. Your problem is later on reading it. json files usually hold ONE json object, not many concatenated objects. You can create a list, and have you dictionaries be items in that list, and then append to it, and dump the entire list as JSON to have multiple dictionaries stored, but eventually its one JSON object. If you want to modify/append a json object in a file, you read it first, load/loads, change it however you want, and write it back. # load it with open("index.json" , "r") as json_file: file_data = json.loads(json_file.read()) # change it file_data.append(dict) # write it all back with open("index.json" , "w") as json_file: json_file.write(json.dumps(file_data)) (Obviously above code assumes you already have a list dumped as a json object in index.json) More on reddit.com