Unable to read a json file in python

Question

I have a json file and I'm trying to read the file using the below code

import json

with open('sample.json') as file:
     data = json.load(file)

and I'm getting the below error

JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

My guess was the json file was not valid so I opened the json file in a text editor and copied the data and tried to validate it via online json validator and the online tool confirmed that its a valid json.

So i wanted to understand what my notebook is reading when I read the file so I tried to print the string and surprisingly the string had a lot of unwanted values such as \n and ï»¿ etc which is definately not there when I open the json file in the notepad.

with open('sample.json') as file:
     test_text = file.read()
print(test_text)

o/p I get in python notebook when I try to print the read file:

'ï»¿[{"iteration" : {"id" :"value"},
"filename" : "testfile.json"
}\n,
{"iteration" : {"id" :"value1"},
"filename" : "testfile2.json"
}\n]'

Please advise what I'm doing wrong and how to fix this

The characters at the beginning look like UTF-8 BOM. Maybe this will help? stackoverflow.com/questions/13156395/… — Andrej Kesely
– Andrej Kesely, Commented Aug 19, 2020 at 11:01
@AndrejKesely thank you very much the Encoding : utf-8-sig did the trick. Out of curiosity what are these encoding patterns? — Stramzik
– Stramzik, Commented Aug 19, 2020 at 11:09
what process creates this file, or where does this file come from? — CobyC
– CobyC, Commented Aug 19, 2020 at 11:09
@CobyC the file was created on Azure DataFactory and encoded in UTF-8 format — Stramzik
– Stramzik, Commented Aug 19, 2020 at 11:14
@Stramzik see the last two paragraphs of this section from the Python codecs docs. — snakecharmerb
– snakecharmerb, Commented Aug 19, 2020 at 11:17

CobyC · Accepted Answer · 2020-08-19 11:36:09Z

0

use the encoding parameter and set it to utf-8-sig

with open('sample.json', encoding='utf-8-sig') as f:
    data = json.load(f)

original answer comes from this question

answered Aug 19, 2020 at 11:36

CobyC

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