Single versus double quotes in json loads in Python

by

Use the proper tool for the job, you are not parsing JSON but Python, so use ast.literal_eval() instead:

>>> import ast
>>> ast.literal_eval('["a", "b", "c"]')
['a', 'b', 'c']
>>> ast.literal_eval("['a', 'b', 'c']")
['a', 'b', 'c']
>>> ast.literal_eval('["mixed", \'quoting\', """styles"""]')
['mixed', 'quoting', 'styles']

  • JSON documents always use double quotes for strings, use UTF-16 for \uhhhh hex escape syntax, have {...} objects for key-value pairs with keys always strings and sequences are always [...] lists, and use null, true and false values; note the lowercase booleans. Numbers come in integer and floating point forms.

  • In Python, string representations can use single and double quotes, Unicode escapes use \uhhhh and \Uhhhhhhhh forms (no UTF-16 surrogate pairs), dictionaries with {...} display syntax can have keys in many different types rather than just strings, sequences can be lists ([...]) but can also use tuples ((...)), or you could have other container types still. Python has None, True and False (Titlecase!) and numbers come in integers, floats, and complex forms.

Confusing one with the other can either lead to parse errors or subtle problems when decoding happened to succeed but the data has been wrongly interpreted, such as with escaped non-BMP codepoints such Emoji. Make sure to use the right method to decode them! And in most cases when you do have Python syntax data someone actually used the wrong method of encoding and only accidentally produced Python representations. See if the source needs fixing in that case; usually the output was produced by using str(object) where json.dumps(obj) should have been used instead.

More Related Contents:

  1. What are the differences between json and simplejson Python modules?
  2. What is faster – Loading a pickled dictionary object or Loading a JSON file – to a dictionary? [closed]
  3. Getting values from JSON using Python
  4. How to read a single object from a json file containing multiple objects using python? [closed]
  5. Split / Explode a column of dictionaries into separate columns with pandas
  6. How do I write JSON data to a file?
  7. How to get string objects instead of Unicode from JSON?
  8. Single vs double quotes in JSON
  9. How to JSON serialize sets?
  10. json.dumps vs flask.jsonify
  11. Python/Json:Expecting property name enclosed in double quotes
  12. Python read JSON file and modify
  13. How to get JSON from webpage into Python script
  14. Python’s json module, converts int dictionary keys to strings
  15. Serializing a Python namedtuple to json
  16. flattening nested Json in pandas data frame
  17. How to convert to a Python datetime object with JSON.loads?
  18. Cast Flask form value to int
  19. Check if key exists and iterate the JSON array using Python
  20. Serialising an Enum member to JSON
  21. Dump to JSON adds additional double quotes and escaping of quotes
  22. How to return data in JSON format using FastAPI?
  23. Python JSON TypeError list indices must be integers or slices, not str
  24. How to send JSON as part of multipart POST-request
  25. How to create a FastAPI endpoint that can accept either Form or JSON body?
  26. Python JSON encoder to support datetime?
  27. json reading error json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Invalid \escape
  28. Converting Flask form data to JSON only gets first value
  29. How to make JSON flattening memory efficient?
  30. urllib2 and json

Leave a Comment