JSON ValueError: Expecting property name: line 1 column 2 (char 1)

Question

I am having trouble using json.loads to convert to a dict object and I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.The exact error I get running this is

ValueError: Expecting property name: line 1 column 2 (char 1)

Here is my code:

from kafka.client import KafkaClient
from kafka.consumer import SimpleConsumer
from kafka.producer import SimpleProducer, KeyedProducer
import pymongo
from pymongo import MongoClient
import json

c = MongoClient("54.210.157.57")
db = c.test_database3
collection = db.tweet_col

kafka = KafkaClient("54.210.157.57:9092")

consumer = SimpleConsumer(kafka,"myconsumer","test")
for tweet in consumer:
    print tweet.message.value
    jsonTweet=json.loads(({u'favorited': False, u'contributors': None})
    collection.insert(jsonTweet)

I'm pretty sure that the error is occuring at the 2nd to last line

jsonTweet=json.loads({u'favorited': False, u'contributors': None})

but I do not know what to do to fix it. Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I encountered another problem that returns the same error.

Single quote issue

I used a json string with single quotes :

{
    'property': 1
}

But json.loads accepts only double quotes for json properties :

{
    "property": 1
}

Final comma issue

json.loads doesn't accept a final comma:

{
  "property": "text", 
  "property2": "text2",
}

Solution: ast to solve single quote and final comma issues

You can use ast (part of standard library for both Python 2 and 3) for this processing. Here is an example :

import ast
# ast.literal_eval() return a dict object, we must use json.dumps to get JSON string
import json

# Single quote to double with ast.literal_eval()
json_data = "{'property': 'text'}"
json_data = ast.literal_eval(json_data)
print(json.dumps(json_data))
# Displays : {"property": "text"}

# ast.literal_eval() with double quotes
json_data = '{"property": "text"}'
json_data = ast.literal_eval(json_data)
print(json.dumps(json_data))
# Displays : {"property": "text"}

# ast.literal_eval() with final coma
json_data = "{'property': 'text', 'property2': 'text2',}"
json_data = ast.literal_eval(json_data)
print(json.dumps(json_data))
# Displays : {"property2": "text2", "property": "text"}

Using ast will prevent you from single quote and final comma issues by interpet the JSON like Python dictionnary (so you must follow the Python dictionnary syntax). It's a pretty good and safely alternative of eval() function for literal structures.

Python documentation warned us of using large/complex string :

Warning It is possible to crash the Python interpreter with a sufficiently large/complex string due to stack depth limitations in Python’s AST compiler.

json.dumps with single quotes

To use json.dumps with single quotes easily you can use this code:

import ast
import json

data = json.dumps(ast.literal_eval(json_data_single_quote))

ast documentation

ast Python 3 doc

ast Python 2 doc

Tool

If you frequently edit JSON, you may use CodeBeautify. It helps you to fix syntax error and minify/beautify JSON.

I hope it helps.