I am getting error Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
when trying to decode JSON.
The URL I use for the API call works fine in the browser, but gives this error when done through a curl request. The following is the code I use for the curl request.
The error happens at return simplejson.loads(response_json)
response_json = self.web_fetch(url)
response_json = response_json.decode('utf-8')
return json.loads(response_json)
def web_fetch(self, url):
buffer = StringIO()
curl = pycurl.Curl()
curl.setopt(curl.URL, url)
curl.setopt(curl.TIMEOUT, self.timeout)
curl.setopt(curl.WRITEFUNCTION, buffer.write)
curl.perform()
curl.close()
response = buffer.getvalue().strip()
return response
Traceback:
File "/Users/nab/Desktop/myenv2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py" in get_response
111. response = callback(request, *callback_args, **callback_kwargs)
File "/Users/nab/Desktop/pricestore/pricemodels/views.py" in view_category
620. apicall=api.API().search_parts(category_id= str(categoryofpart.api_id), manufacturer = manufacturer, filter = filters, start=(catpage-1)*20, limit=20, sort_by='[["mpn","asc"]]')
File "/Users/nab/Desktop/pricestore/pricemodels/api.py" in search_parts
176. return simplejson.loads(response_json)
File "/Users/nab/Desktop/myenv2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/simplejson/__init__.py" in loads
455. return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "/Users/nab/Desktop/myenv2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/simplejson/decoder.py" in decode
374. obj, end = self.raw_decode(s)
File "/Users/nab/Desktop/myenv2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/simplejson/decoder.py" in raw_decode
393. return self.scan_once(s, idx=_w(s, idx).end())
Exception Type: JSONDecodeError at /pricemodels/2/dir/
Exception Value: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
asked May 15, 2013 at 19:22
user1328021user1328021
8,90014 gold badges46 silver badges76 bronze badges
11
Your code produced an empty response body, you’d want to check for that or catch the exception raised. It is possible the server responded with a 204 No Content response, or a non-200-range status code was returned (404 Not Found, etc.). Check for this.
Note:
-
There is no need to use
simplejson
library, the same library is included with Python as thejson
module. -
There is no need to decode a response from UTF8 to unicode, the
simplejson
/json
.loads()
method can handle UTF8 encoded data natively. -
pycurl
has a very archaic API. Unless you have a specific requirement for using it, there are better choices.
Either the requests
or httpx
offers much friendlier APIs, including JSON support. If you can, replace your call with:
import requests
response = requests.get(url)
response.raise_for_status() # raises exception when not a 2xx response
if response.status_code != 204:
return response.json()
Of course, this won’t protect you from a URL that doesn’t comply with HTTP standards; when using arbirary URLs where this is a possibility, check if the server intended to give you JSON by checking the Content-Type header, and for good measure catch the exception:
if (
response.status_code != 204 and
response.headers["content-type"].strip().startswith("application/json")
):
try:
return response.json()
except ValueError:
# decide how to handle a server that's misbehaving to this extent
answered May 15, 2013 at 21:13
Martijn Pieters♦Martijn Pieters
1.0m295 gold badges4027 silver badges3321 bronze badges
1
Be sure to remember to invoke json.loads()
on the contents of the file, as opposed to the file path of that JSON:
json_file_path = "/path/to/example.json"
with open(json_file_path, 'r') as j:
contents = json.loads(j.read())
I think a lot of people are guilty of doing this every once in a while (myself included):
contents = json.load(json_file_path)
Wyrmwood
3,23029 silver badges33 bronze badges
answered Oct 31, 2019 at 16:13
3
Check the response data-body, whether actual data is present and a data-dump appears to be well-formatted.
In most cases your json.loads
— JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
error is due to :
- non-JSON conforming quoting
- XML/HTML output (that is, a string starting with <), or
- incompatible character encoding
Ultimately the error tells you that at the very first position the string already doesn’t conform to JSON.
As such, if parsing fails despite having a data-body that looks JSON like at first glance, try replacing the quotes of the data-body:
import sys, json
struct = {}
try:
try: #try parsing to dict
dataform = str(response_json).strip("'<>() ").replace(''', '"')
struct = json.loads(dataform)
except:
print repr(resonse_json)
print sys.exc_info()
Note: Quotes within the data must be properly escaped
answered Aug 27, 2013 at 8:48
Lorenz Lo SauerLorenz Lo Sauer
23.5k16 gold badges84 silver badges87 bronze badges
4
With the requests
lib JSONDecodeError
can happen when you have an http error code like 404 and try to parse the response as JSON !
You must first check for 200 (OK) or let it raise on error to avoid this case.
I wish it failed with a less cryptic error message.
NOTE: as Martijn Pieters stated in the comments servers can respond with JSON in case of errors (it depends on the implementation), so checking the Content-Type
header is more reliable.
answered May 29, 2017 at 12:14
3
Check encoding format of your file and use corresponding encoding format while reading file. It will solve your problem.
with open("AB.json", encoding='utf-8', errors='ignore') as json_data:
data = json.load(json_data, strict=False)
answered Mar 6, 2019 at 6:21
2
I had the same issue trying to read json files with
json.loads("file.json")
I solved the problem with
with open("file.json", "r") as read_file:
data = json.load(read_file)
maybe this can help in your case
answered Jul 9, 2020 at 13:23
GaluoisesGaluoises
2,49222 silver badges28 bronze badges
1
A lot of times, this will be because the string you’re trying to parse is blank:
>>> import json
>>> x = json.loads("")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.3/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/json/__init__.py", line 348, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.3/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/json/decoder.py", line 337, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.3/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/json/decoder.py", line 355, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
You can remedy by checking whether json_string
is empty beforehand:
import json
if json_string:
x = json.loads(json_string)
else:
# Your code/logic here
x = {}
answered May 6, 2019 at 20:58
Alex WAlex W
37k13 gold badges106 silver badges109 bronze badges
4
I encounterred the same problem, while print out the json string opened from a json file, found the json string starts with ‘’, which by doing some reserach is due to the file is by default decoded with UTF-8, and by changing encoding to utf-8-sig, the mark out is stripped out and loads json no problem:
open('test.json', encoding='utf-8-sig')
answered Jun 23, 2020 at 21:00
user9571515user9571515
2895 silver badges14 bronze badges
1
This is the minimalist solution I found when you want to load json file in python
import json
data = json.load(open('file_name.json'))
If this give error saying character doesn’t match on position X and Y, then just add encoding='utf-8'
inside the open
round bracket
data = json.load(open('file_name.json', encoding='utf-8'))
Explanation
open
opens the file and reads the containts which later parse inside json.load
.
Do note that using with open() as f
is more reliable than above syntax, since it make sure that file get closed after execution, the complete sytax would be
with open('file_name.json') as f:
data = json.load(f)
answered Oct 1, 2021 at 7:58
There may be embedded 0’s, even after calling decode(). Use replace():
import json
struct = {}
try:
response_json = response_json.decode('utf-8').replace('', '')
struct = json.loads(response_json)
except:
print('bad json: ', response_json)
return struct
answered Sep 29, 2017 at 19:13
bryanbryan
1301 silver badge6 bronze badges
2
I had the same issue, in my case I solved like this:
import json
with open("migrate.json", "rb") as read_file:
data = json.load(read_file)
answered May 2, 2021 at 9:50
I was having the same problem with requests (the python library). It happened to be the accept-encoding
header.
It was set this way: 'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br'
I simply removed it from the request and stopped getting the error.
answered Nov 19, 2018 at 10:08
Seu MadrugaSeu Madruga
3257 silver badges13 bronze badges
Just check if the request has a status code 200. So for example:
if status != 200:
print("An error has occured. [Status code", status, "]")
else:
data = response.json() #Only convert to Json when status is OK.
if not data["elements"]:
print("Empty JSON")
else:
"You can extract data here"
answered May 29, 2020 at 13:36
Wout VCWout VC
3271 gold badge4 silver badges8 bronze badges
In my case I was doing file.read() two times in if and else block which was causing this error. so make sure to not do this mistake and hold contain in variable and use variable multiple times.
answered Nov 23, 2021 at 8:01
I had exactly this issue using requests.
Thanks to Christophe Roussy for his explanation.
To debug, I used:
response = requests.get(url)
logger.info(type(response))
I was getting a 404 response back from the API.
answered Sep 20, 2018 at 15:12
Kelsie CKelsie C
411 silver badge4 bronze badges
2
In my case it occured because i read the data of the file using file.read()
and then tried to parse it using json.load(file)
.I fixed the problem by replacing json.load(file)
with json.loads(data)
Not working code
with open("text.json") as file:
data=file.read()
json_dict=json.load(file)
working code
with open("text.json") as file:
data=file.read()
json_dict=json.loads(data)
answered Apr 10, 2022 at 6:01
4
For me, it was not using authentication in the request.
answered Dec 12, 2019 at 16:34
Neel0507Neel0507
1,0942 gold badges11 silver badges18 bronze badges
I did:
- Open
test.txt
file, write data - Open
test.txt
file, read data
So I didn’t close file after 1.
I added
outfile.close()
and now it works
answered Jul 19, 2021 at 23:09
parsecerparsecer
4,68812 gold badges68 silver badges137 bronze badges
1
For me it was server responding with something other than 200 and the response was not json formatted. I ended up doing this before the json parse:
# this is the https request for data in json format
response_json = requests.get()
# only proceed if I have a 200 response which is saved in status_code
if (response_json.status_code == 200):
response = response_json.json() #converting from json to dictionary using json library
answered Jan 5, 2020 at 19:43
FastGTRFastGTR
3434 silver badges4 bronze badges
1
I received such an error in a Python-based web API’s response .text
, but it led me here, so this may help others with a similar issue (it’s very difficult to filter response and request issues in a search when using requests
..)
Using json.dumps()
on the request data
arg to create a correctly-escaped string of JSON before POSTing fixed the issue for me
requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(data))
answered Jun 12, 2020 at 18:54
ti7ti7
15.8k6 gold badges39 silver badges67 bronze badges
In my case it is because the server is giving http error occasionally. So basically once in a while my script gets the response like this rahter than the expected response:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html>
<head><title>502 Bad Gateway</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<h1>502 Bad Gateway</h1>
<p>The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.<hr/>Powered by Tengine</body>
</html>
Clearly this is not in json format and trying to call .json()
will yield JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
You can print the exact response that causes this error to better debug.
For example if you are using requests
and then simply print the .text
field (before you call .json()
) would do.
answered Dec 27, 2020 at 5:41
Qin HeyangQin Heyang
1,3861 gold badge16 silver badges17 bronze badges
If you are a Windows user, Tweepy API can generate an empty line between data objects. Because of this situation, you can get «JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)» error. To avoid this error, you can delete empty lines.
For example:
def on_data(self, data):
try:
with open('sentiment.json', 'a', newline='n') as f:
f.write(data)
return True
except BaseException as e:
print("Error on_data: %s" % str(e))
return True
Reference:
Twitter stream API gives JSONDecodeError(«Expecting value», s, err.value) from None
answered Mar 13, 2020 at 20:08
drorhundrorhun
4757 silver badges22 bronze badges
1
if you use headers and have "Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate, br"
install brotli library with pip install. You don’t need to import brotli to your py file.
answered Dec 31, 2021 at 20:16
JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) occurs while working with JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. You might be storing some data or trying to fetch JSON data from an API(Application Programming Interface). In this guide, we will discuss where it can creep in and how to resolve it.
JSONDecodeError means there is an incorrect JSON format being followed. For instance, the JSON data may be missing a curly bracket, have a key that does not have a value, and data not enclosed within double-quotes or some other syntactic error.
Generally, the error expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) error can occur due to the following reasons.
- Non-JSON conforming quoting
- Empty JSON file
- XML output (that is, a string starting with <)
Let’s elaborate on the points stated above:
1. Non-JSON conforming quoting
JSON or JavaScript Object Notation has a similar format to that of the python dictionary datatype. A dictionary requires a key or value to be enclosed in quotes if it is a string. Similarly, the JSON standard defines that keys need not be a string. However, keys should always be enclosed within double quotes. Not following this standard can also raise an error.
2. Empty JSON file
For this example, we have taken an empty JSON file named test.py and another file named test.py, which contains the code given below. Using context manager, we open the JSON file in reading mode and load it using the load method. However, an error is thrown because the JSON file is empty.
import json with open("test.json", "r") as file: data = json.load(file) print("Data retrieved")
3. XML output (that is, a string starting with <)
The Extensible Markup Language, or simply XML, is a simple text-based format for representing structured information: documents, data, configuration, books, transactions, invoices, and much more. Similar to JSON, it is an older way of storing data. Earlier APIs used to return data in XML format; however, JSON is nowadays the preferred choice. Let’s see how we can face the expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) type error in this case.
<part number="1976"> <name>Windscreen Wiper</name> <description>The Windscreen wiper automatically removes rain from your windscreen, if it should happen to splash there. It has a rubber <ref part="1977">blade</ref> which can be ordered separately if you need to replace it. </description> </part>
import json with open("test.xml", "r") as file: data = json.load(file) print("Data retrieved")
Let’s break down what is happening here.
- For ease of example, suppose API returns an XML format data, as shown above.
- Now, when we try to load that response from API, we will get a type error.
Resolving JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
1. Solution for Non-JSON conforming quoting
To resolve the type error in this case, you need to ensure that the keys and values are enclosed within the double quotes. This is necessary because it is a part of JSON syntax. It is important to realize that JSON only uses double quotes, not single quotes.
2. Solution for empty JSON file
The solution for this is self-evident in the name. To resolve the type error, in this case, make sure that the JSON file or the response from an API is not empty. If the file is empty, add content to it, and for a response from an API, use try-except to handle the error, which can be empty JSON or a 404 error, for instance.
import json import requests def main(): URL = "https://api.dictionaryapi.dev/api/v2/enties/en/" word = input("Enter a word:") data = requests.get(url + word) data = data.text try: data_json = json.loads(data) print(data_json) except json.JSONDecodeError: print("Empty response") if __name__ == "__main__": main()
The above code takes in a word and returns all the information related to it in a JSON format. Now in order to show how we can handle the Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) type error, we have altered the URL. entries have been changed to enties. Therefore we will get an invalid response which will not be of the JSON format. However, this is merely done to imitate the error when you might get an invalid response from an API.
- Now, if you try to run the code above, you will be prompted to enter a word. The response is saved into the data variable and later converted to a string.
- However, in the try block json.loads method, which parses JSON string to python dictionary raises an error.
- This is because the response sent by API is not of JSON format, hence can’t be parsed, resulting in JSONDecodeError.
- JSONDecodeError gets handled by the try-except block, and a “Response content is not valid JSON” gets printed as an outcome.
3. Solution for XML output(that is, a string starting with <)
To avoid type errors resulting from an XML format, we will convert it to a JSON format. However, firstly install this library.
pip install xmltodict
import json import xmltodict with open("test.xml", "r") as file: data = xmltodict.parse(file.read()) file.close() json_data = json.dumps(data) with open("t.json", "w") as json_file: json_file.write(json_data) json_file.close() print("Data retrieved") print(data)
Let’s elaborate on the code above:
- We have imported two libraries, namely JSON and xmltodict.
- Using the context manager with, XML file test.xml is opened in read mode. Thereafter using the xmltodict parse method, it is converted to a dictionary type, and the file is closed.
- json.dumps() takes in a JSON object and returns a string of that object.
- Again using context manager with, a JSON file is created, XML data that was converted to a JSON string is written on it, and the file is closed.
JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) Django
This issue is caused by the failure of Pipenv 2018.10.9. To resolve this issue, use Pipenv 2018.5.18. For more, read here.
Are you facing this error in Flask?
Many times, when you receive the data from HTTP requests, they are fetched as bytes. So, if you face JSONDecodeError, you might be dealing with a JSON in bytes. First, you need to decode the JSON by using response.decode('utf-8')
. This will create a string, and then you can parse it.
FAQs
How to parse JSON in python?
json.loads() method can be used to parse JSON in python. For instance:import json
json_string = '{"a":"1", "b":"2", "c":"3"}'
json_to_dict = json.loads(json_string)
print(json_to_dict)
print(type(json_to_dict))
How to detect empty file/string before parsing JSON?
import os
)
file_path = "/home/nikhilomkar/Desktop/test.json"
print("File is empty!" if os.stat(file_path).st_size == 0 else "File isn't empty!"
The following code checks if the file is empty and prints the File is empty! If true, else, the File isn’t empty!.
Conclusion JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
The following article discussed the JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0). This error is due to various decoding and formatting errors. We looked at likely situations where it can occur and how to resolve it.
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If you try to parse invalid JSON or decode an empty string as JSON, you will encounter the JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0). This error can occur if you read an empty file using json.load, read an empty JSON or receive an empty response from an API call.
You can use a try-except code block to catch the error and then check the contents of the JSON string or file before retrying.
This tutorial will go through the error in detail and how to solve it with code examples.
Table of contents
- JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
- Example #1: Incorrect use of json.loads()
- Solution
- Example #2: Empty JSON file
- Solution
- Example #3: Response Request
- Summary
JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
In Python, JSONDecodeError occurs when there is an issue with the formatting of the JSON data. This specific error tells us the JSON decoder has encountered an empty JSON.
Example #1: Incorrect use of json.loads()
Let’s look at an example where we have a JSON file with the following contents:
[ {"margherita":7.99}, {"pepperoni":9.99}, {"four cheeses":10.99} ]
We want to read the data into a program using the json
library. Let’s look at the code:
import json json_path = 'pizza.json' data = json.loads(json_path)
In the above code, we try to read the data in using json.loads()
. Let’s run the code to see the result:
JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
The error occurs because json.loads()
expects a JSON encoded string, not a filename. The string pizza.json
is not a valid JSON encoded string.
Solution
We need to use json.load()
instead of json.loads()
to read a file. Let’s look at the revised code:
import json json_path = 'pizza.json' with open(json_path, 'r') as f: data = json.loads(f.read()) print(data)
In the above code, we use the open()
function to create a file object that json.load()
can read and return the decoded data object. The with
statement is a context manager that ensures that the file is closed once the code is complete. Let’s run the code to see the result:
[{'margherita': 7.99}, {'pepperoni': 9.99}, {'four cheeses': 10.99}]
Example #2: Empty JSON file
Let’s look at an example where we have an empty file, which we will try to read in using json.loads()
. The file is called particles.json
. Since the JSON file is empty, the JSON decoder will throw the JSONDecodeError when it tries to read the file’s contents. Let’s look at the code:
import json filename = 'particles.json' with open(filename, 'r') as f: contents = json.loads(f.read()) print(contents)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- JSONDecodeError Traceback (most recent call last) Input In [1], in <cell line: 5>() 3 filename = 'particles.json' 5 with open(filename, 'r') as f: ----> 6 contents = json.loads(f.read()) 7 print(contents) File ~/opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/json/__init__.py:357, in loads(s, cls, object_hook, parse_float, parse_int, parse_constant, object_pairs_hook, **kw) 352 del kw['encoding'] 354 if (cls is None and object_hook is None and 355 parse_int is None and parse_float is None and 356 parse_constant is None and object_pairs_hook is None and not kw): --> 357 return _default_decoder.decode(s) 358 if cls is None: 359 cls = JSONDecoder File ~/opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/json/decoder.py:337, in JSONDecoder.decode(self, s, _w) 332 def decode(self, s, _w=WHITESPACE.match): 333 """Return the Python representation of ``s`` (a ``str`` instance 334 containing a JSON document). 335 336 """ --> 337 obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end()) 338 end = _w(s, end).end() 339 if end != len(s): File ~/opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.8/json/decoder.py:355, in JSONDecoder.raw_decode(self, s, idx) 353 obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx) 354 except StopIteration as err: --> 355 raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None 356 return obj, end JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
Solution
If the file is empty, it is good practice to add a try-except statement to catch the JSONDecodeError. Let’s look at the code:
import json filename = 'particles.json' with open(filename, 'r') as f: try: contents = json.loads(f.read()) print(contents) except json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: print('File is empty')
File is empty
Now we have verified the file is empty, we can add some content to the file. We will add three particle names together with their masses.
[ {"proton":938.3}, {"neutron":939.6}, {"electron":0.51} ]
Let’s try to read the JSON file into our program and print the contents to the console:
import json filename = 'particles.json' with open(filename, 'r') as f: try: contents = json.loads(f.read()) print(contents) except json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: print('File is empty')
[{'proton': 938.3}, {'neutron': 939.6}, {'electron': 0.51}]
We successfully read the contents of the file into a list object.
Example #3: Response Request
Let’s look at an example where we want to parse a JSON response using the requests library. We will send a RESTful GET call to a server, and in return, we get a response in JSON format. The requests library has a built-in JSON decoder, response.json(), which provides the payload data in the JSON serialized format.
We may encounter a response that has an error status code or is not content-type application/json
. We must check that the response status code is 200 (OK) before performing the JSON parse. Let’s look at the code to check the response has the 200
status code and has the valid content type. application/json
.
import requests from requests.exceptions import HTTPError url = 'https://httpbin.org/get' try: response = requests.get(url) status = response.status_code if (status != 204 and response.headers["content-type"].strip().startswith("application/json")): try: json_response = response.json() print(json_response) except ValueError: print('Bad Data from Server. Response content is not valid JSON') elif (status != 204): try: print(response.text) except ValueError: print('Bad Data From Server. Reponse content is not valid text') except HTTPError as http_err: print(f'HTTP error occurred: {http_err}') except Exception as err: print(f'Other error occurred: {err}')
In the above example, we use httpbin.org to execute a GET call. Let’s run the code to get the result:
{'args': {}, 'headers': {'Accept': '*/*', 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br', 'Host': 'httpbin.org', 'User-Agent': 'python-requests/2.27.1', 'X-Amzn-Trace-Id': 'Root=1-6265a5c1-3b57327c02057a3a39ffe86d'}, 'origin': '90.206.95.191', 'url': 'https://httpbin.org/get'}
Summary
Congratulations on reading to the end of this tutorial! The JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) occurs either when data is not present in a file, the JSON string is empty, or the payload from a RESTful call is empty.
You can resolve this error by checking the JSON file or string for valid content and using an if-statement when making a RESTful call to ensure the status code is 200 and the content type is application/json
.
For further reading on errors involving JSON, go to the articles:
- How to Solve Python ValueError: Trailing data
- How to Solve Python JSONDecodeError: extra data
- How to Solve Python TypeError: Object of type datetime is not JSON serializable
- How to Solve Python JSONDecodeError: Expecting ‘,’ delimiter: line 1
Have fun and happy researching!
Table of Contents
Hide
- JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
- Example JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
- Solution
- Other Possible Solutions
- Ensure HTTP 200 status code and valid content type as application/json
- Invoke json.load() on the contents of the file
If you are working with APIs and trying to fetch and parse the JSON data while making the HTTP or curl requests and JSON response is not well-formed, Python will throw json.decoder.jsondecodeerror: expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0).
Let us take a look at the possible causes of JSONDecodeError and how we solve this issue in our code with some examples.
In most of cases, you get json.loads- JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) error is due to :
- The response might be in some other format such as XML, HTML, etc.
- The JSON response is not structured properly.
- The response type doesn’t come in the format of application/json. Rather it comes in string format, which in turn throws a JSONDecodeError while parsing the response.
- Empty response
- Invalid status code or httpx error
Also, read the Python JSONPath tutorial
Example JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
Let me demonstrate with a simple example of replicating a JSONDecodeError, and we will look at solving the same.
In this example, we are trying to load a JSON file from the specified path and print the contents of the JSON file. However, since the JSON file is empty, the JSON module will throw a JSONDecodeError when we try to read the empty content. It always expects the proper JSON structure.
import json
file_path = "C:/Projects/Tryouts/books.json"
with open(file_path, 'r') as j:
contents = json.loads(j.read())
print(contents)
Output
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "c:/Projects/Tryouts/main.py", line 6, in <module>
contents = json.loads(j.read())
File "C:UsersabcAppDataLocalProgramsPythonPython37libjson__init__.py", line 348, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "C:UsersabcAppDataLocalProgramsPythonPython37libjsondecoder.py", line 337, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
File "C:UsersabcAppDataLocalProgramsPythonPython37libjsondecoder.py", line 355, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
The json.loads(j.read())
tries to load the JSON content and parse the JSON, and during that time, if it’s not well structured, you get a JSONDecodeError.
Note: In this case, if the JSON file is not found, you will get a FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Solution
The solution is simple and straightforward. Validate if the file is not empty and has proper JSON content. Now that we have added the proper content to the books.json file when we run the same code again, we get the below output.
# Python program to solve JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
import json
file_path = "C:/Projects/Tryouts/books.json"
with open(file_path, 'r') as j:
contents = json.loads(j.read())
print(contents)
Output
{'category': 'reference', 'author': 'Nigel Rees', 'title': 'Sayings of the Century', 'isbn': '6-246-2356-8', 'price': 8.95}
Other Possible Solutions
Ensure HTTP 200 status code and valid content type as application/json
If you are making requests to API, make sure to check the response status code is 200 (OK) and then perform JSON parse. Below is the sample snippet on how you can ensure to check the response has 200 status code and valid content type as application/json
if (
response.status_code != 204 and
response.headers["content-type"].strip().startswith("application/json")
):
try:
return response.json()
except ValueError:
# decide how to handle a server that's misbehaving to this extent
Invoke json.load() on the contents of the file
If you are calling and loading json files directly, ensure that you are not passing a file path directly to the json.load()
method instead pass the contents into the json.load()
method.
Bad Practice
json_file_path = "/path/to/example.json"
contents = json.loads(json_file_path)
Good Practice
json_file_path = "/path/to/example.json"
with open(json_file_path, 'r') as j:
contents = json.loads(j.read())
Srinivas Ramakrishna is a Solution Architect and has 14+ Years of Experience in the Software Industry. He has published many articles on Medium, Hackernoon, dev.to and solved many problems in StackOverflow. He has core expertise in various technologies such as Microsoft .NET Core, Python, Node.JS, JavaScript, Cloud (Azure), RDBMS (MSSQL), React, Powershell, etc.
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The error “JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)” can happen when you working with Python. Learn why Python raises this exception and how you can resolve it.
Reproduce The Error
Python provides a built-in module for encoding and decoding JSON contents, which can be strings or files. The loads()
is one of the most popular functions in this module. However, it raises a JSONDecodeError instead:
>>> import json
>>> json.loads(“”)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/lib/python3.10/json/decoder.py”, line 355, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError(“Expecting value”, s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
When you read an empty JSON file with load()
, Python will also print out a similar error message:
>>> import json
>>> with open("empty.json", "r") as emptyJSON:
... print(json.load(emptyJSON))
....
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3.10/json/decoder.py", line 355, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 2 column 1 (char 2)
You can run into this error outside the json module as well. Requests is a popular library for dealing with HTTP requests in Python. It supports the json()
method, which converts the fetched content from a resource URI into a JSON object. But it can unexpectedly raise the JSONDecodeError exception:
>>> import requests
>>> URL="http://httpbin.org/status/200"
>>> response = requests.delete(URL)
>>> print(response.json())
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
…
raise RequestsJSONDecodeError(e.msg, e.doc, e.pos)
requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
Explain The Error
The first two examples are obvious. The error message is displayed in those cases because you provide load()
and loads()
with empty JSON content.
When those methods fail to deserialize and parse a valid JSON document from those sources, they raise the JSONDecodeError exception.
From this clue, we can guess why the response.json()
method in the third example also produces the same error.
There is a high chance the response object itself is empty. This is indeed true, which can be verified by using response.text
to get the content of the response:
This is a common response message when we send an HTTP DELETE request to delete a resource. This can be the case even with the status code 200 (meaning the deleting action has been carried out).
Solutions
Refraining from parsing empty files and strings as JSON documents is an obvious fix. But in many situations, we can’t control whether a data source can be empty or not.
Python, however, allows us to handle exceptions like JSONDecodeError. For instance, you can use the try-catch
statements below to prevent error messages in the case of empty strings and files:
Example 1
try: json.loads("") except json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: print("")
Example 2
try: with open("empty.json", "r") as emptyJSON: print(json.load(emptyJSON)) except json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: print("")
Those snippets execute the loads()
and load()
functions. If the JSONDecodeError exception is raised, Python executes the except
clause and prints an empty string instead of an error message.
We can apply the same idea when parsing the content of an HTTP request response:
try: URL = "http://httpbin.org/status/200" response = requests.delete(URL) print(response.json()) except requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError: print("")
It is important to note that you must change the exception to catch from json.decoder.JSONDecodeError
to requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError
.
Summary
Python throws the error “JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)” when it parses an empty string or file as JSON. You can use a try
statement to catch
and handle this exception.
Maybe you are interested in similar errors:
- DataFrame constructor not properly called!
- ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘tensorflow’ in python
- ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘scipy’ in Python
- RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration
Srinivas Ramakrishna is a Solution Architect and has 14+ Years of Experience in the Software Industry. He has published many articles on Medium, Hackernoon, dev.to and solved many problems in StackOverflow. He has core expertise in various technologies such as Microsoft .NET Core, Python, Node.JS, JavaScript, Cloud (Azure), RDBMS (MSSQL), React, Powershell, etc.
Sign Up for Our Newsletters
Subscribe to get notified of the latest articles. We will never spam you. Be a part of our ever-growing community.
By checking this box, you confirm that you have read and are agreeing to our terms of use regarding the storage of the data submitted through this form.
The error “JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)” can happen when you working with Python. Learn why Python raises this exception and how you can resolve it.
Reproduce The Error
Python provides a built-in module for encoding and decoding JSON contents, which can be strings or files. The loads()
is one of the most popular functions in this module. However, it raises a JSONDecodeError instead:
>>> import json
>>> json.loads(“”)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/lib/python3.10/json/decoder.py”, line 355, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError(“Expecting value”, s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
When you read an empty JSON file with load()
, Python will also print out a similar error message:
>>> import json
>>> with open("empty.json", "r") as emptyJSON:
... print(json.load(emptyJSON))
....
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3.10/json/decoder.py", line 355, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 2 column 1 (char 2)
You can run into this error outside the json module as well. Requests is a popular library for dealing with HTTP requests in Python. It supports the json()
method, which converts the fetched content from a resource URI into a JSON object. But it can unexpectedly raise the JSONDecodeError exception:
>>> import requests
>>> URL="http://httpbin.org/status/200"
>>> response = requests.delete(URL)
>>> print(response.json())
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
…
raise RequestsJSONDecodeError(e.msg, e.doc, e.pos)
requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
Explain The Error
The first two examples are obvious. The error message is displayed in those cases because you provide load()
and loads()
with empty JSON content.
When those methods fail to deserialize and parse a valid JSON document from those sources, they raise the JSONDecodeError exception.
From this clue, we can guess why the response.json()
method in the third example also produces the same error.
There is a high chance the response object itself is empty. This is indeed true, which can be verified by using response.text
to get the content of the response:
This is a common response message when we send an HTTP DELETE request to delete a resource. This can be the case even with the status code 200 (meaning the deleting action has been carried out).
Solutions
Refraining from parsing empty files and strings as JSON documents is an obvious fix. But in many situations, we can’t control whether a data source can be empty or not.
Python, however, allows us to handle exceptions like JSONDecodeError. For instance, you can use the try-catch
statements below to prevent error messages in the case of empty strings and files:
Example 1
try: json.loads("") except json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: print("")
Example 2
try: with open("empty.json", "r") as emptyJSON: print(json.load(emptyJSON)) except json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: print("")
Those snippets execute the loads()
and load()
functions. If the JSONDecodeError exception is raised, Python executes the except
clause and prints an empty string instead of an error message.
We can apply the same idea when parsing the content of an HTTP request response:
try: URL = "http://httpbin.org/status/200" response = requests.delete(URL) print(response.json()) except requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError: print("")
It is important to note that you must change the exception to catch from json.decoder.JSONDecodeError
to requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError
.
Summary
Python throws the error “JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)” when it parses an empty string or file as JSON. You can use a try
statement to catch
and handle this exception.
Maybe you are interested in similar errors:
- DataFrame constructor not properly called!
- ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘tensorflow’ in python
- ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘scipy’ in Python
- RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration
My name is Robert. I have a degree in information technology and two years of expertise in software development. I’ve come to offer my understanding on programming languages. I hope you find my articles interesting.
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