Let JSON object accept bytes or let urlopen output strings

user_85514 0
Viewed 158579

With Python 3 I am requesting a json document from a URL.

response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)

The response object is a file-like object with read and readline methods. Normally a JSON object can be created with a file opened in text mode.

obj = json.load(fp)

What I would like to do is:

obj = json.load(response)

This however does not work as urlopen returns a file object in binary mode.

A work around is of course:

str_response = response.read().decode('utf-8')
obj = json.loads(str_response)

but this feels bad...

Is there a better way that I can transform a bytes file object to a string file object? Or am I missing any parameters for either urlopen or json.load to give an encoding?

urlopen encoding python-3.x python json
12 Answers

For anyone else trying to solve this using the requests library:

import json
import requests

r = requests.get('http://localhost/index.json')
r.raise_for_status()
# works for Python2 and Python3
json.loads(r.content.decode('utf-8'))
user_24041520

As of Python 3.6, you can use json.loads() to deserialize a bytesobject directly (the encoding must be UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32). So, using only modules from the standard library, you can do:

import json
from urllib import request

response = request.urlopen(url).read()
data = json.loads(response)
user_2442970
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