I am getting some data from a JSON file “new.json”, and I want to filter some data and store it into a new JSON file. Here is my code:

import json
with open('new.json') as infile:
    data = json.load(infile)
for item in data:
    iden = item.get["id"]
    a = item.get["a"]
    b = item.get["b"]
    c = item.get["c"]
    if c == 'XYZ' or  "XYZ" in data["text"]:
        filename = 'abc.json'
    try:
        outfile = open(filename,'ab')
    except:
        outfile = open(filename,'wb')
    obj_json={}
    obj_json["ID"] = iden
    obj_json["VAL_A"] = a
    obj_json["VAL_B"] = b

and I am getting an error, the traceback is:

  File "rtfav.py", line 3, in <module>
    data = json.load(infile)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 278, in load
    **kw)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 326, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 369, in decode
    raise ValueError(errmsg("Extra data", s, end, len(s)))
ValueError: Extra data: line 88 column 2 - line 50607 column 2 (char 3077 - 1868399)

Can someone help me?

Here is a sample of the data in new.json, there are about 1500 more such dictionaries in the file

{
    "contributors": null, 
    "truncated": false, 
    "text": "@HomeShop18 #DreamJob to professional rafter", 
    "in_reply_to_status_id": null, 
    "id": 421584490452893696, 
    "favorite_count": 0, 
    "source": "<a href=\"https://mobile.twitter.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">Mobile Web (M2)</a>", 
    "retweeted": false, 
    "coordinates": null, 
    "entities": {
        "symbols": [], 
        "user_mentions": [
            {
                "id": 183093247, 
                "indices": [
                    0, 
                    11
                ], 
                "id_str": "183093247", 
                "screen_name": "HomeShop18", 
                "name": "HomeShop18"
            }
        ], 
        "hashtags": [
            {
                "indices": [
                    12, 
                    21
                ], 
                "text": "DreamJob"
            }
        ], 
        "urls": []
    }, 
    "in_reply_to_screen_name": "HomeShop18", 
    "id_str": "421584490452893696", 
    "retweet_count": 0, 
    "in_reply_to_user_id": 183093247, 
    "favorited": false, 
    "user": {
        "follow_request_sent": null, 
        "profile_use_background_image": true, 
        "default_profile_image": false, 
        "id": 2254546045, 
        "verified": false, 
        "profile_image_url_https": "https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/413952088880594944/rcdr59OY_normal.jpeg", 
        "profile_sidebar_fill_color": "171106", 
        "profile_text_color": "8A7302", 
        "followers_count": 87, 
        "profile_sidebar_border_color": "BCB302", 
        "id_str": "2254546045", 
        "profile_background_color": "0F0A02", 
        "listed_count": 1, 
        "profile_background_image_url_https": "https://abs.twimg.com/images/themes/theme1/bg.png", 
        "utc_offset": null, 
        "statuses_count": 9793, 
        "description": "Rafter. Rafting is what I do. Me aur mera Tablet.  Technocrat of Future", 
        "friends_count": 231, 
        "location": "", 
        "profile_link_color": "473623", 
        "profile_image_url": "http://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/413952088880594944/rcdr59OY_normal.jpeg", 
        "following": null, 
        "geo_enabled": false, 
        "profile_banner_url": "https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_banners/2254546045/1388065343", 
        "profile_background_image_url": "http://abs.twimg.com/images/themes/theme1/bg.png", 
        "name": "Jayy", 
        "lang": "en", 
        "profile_background_tile": false, 
        "favourites_count": 41, 
        "screen_name": "JzayyPsingh", 
        "notifications": null, 
        "url": null, 
        "created_at": "Fri Dec 20 05:46:00 +0000 2013", 
        "contributors_enabled": false, 
        "time_zone": null, 
        "protected": false, 
        "default_profile": false, 
        "is_translator": false
    }, 
    "geo": null, 
    "in_reply_to_user_id_str": "183093247", 
    "lang": "en", 
    "created_at": "Fri Jan 10 10:09:09 +0000 2014", 
    "filter_level": "medium", 
    "in_reply_to_status_id_str": null, 
    "place": null
} 

As you can see in the following example, json.loads (and json.load) does not decode multiple json object.

>>> json.loads('{}')
{}
>>> json.loads('{}{}') # == json.loads(json.dumps({}) + json.dumps({}))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Python27\lib\json\__init__.py", line 338, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\json\decoder.py", line 368, in decode
    raise ValueError(errmsg("Extra data", s, end, len(s)))
ValueError: Extra data: line 1 column 3 - line 1 column 5 (char 2 - 4)

If you want to dump multiple dictionaries, wrap them in a list, dump the list (instead of dumping dictionaries multiple times)

>>> dict1 = {}
>>> dict2 = {}
>>> json.dumps([dict1, dict2])
'[{}, {}]'
>>> json.loads(json.dumps([dict1, dict2]))
[{}, {}]

You can just read from a file, jsonifying each line as you go:

tweets = []
for line in open('tweets.json', 'r'):
    tweets.append(json.loads(line))

This avoids storing intermediate python objects. As long as your write one full tweet per append() call, this should work.

I came across this because I was trying to load a JSON file dumped from MongoDB. It was giving me an error

JSONDecodeError: Extra data: line 2 column 1

The MongoDB JSON dump has one object per line, so what worked for me is:

import json
data = [json.loads(line) for line in open('data.json', 'r')]

This may also happen if your JSON file is not just 1 JSON record. A JSON record looks like this:

[{"some data": value, "next key": "another value"}]

It opens and closes with a bracket [ ], within the brackets are the braces { }. There can be many pairs of braces, but it all ends with a close bracket ]. If your json file contains more than one of those:

[{"some data": value, "next key": "another value"}]
[{"2nd record data": value, "2nd record key": "another value"}]

then loads() will fail.

I verified this with my own file that was failing.

import json

guestFile = open("1_guests.json",'r')
guestData = guestFile.read()
guestFile.close()
gdfJson = json.loads(guestData)

This works because 1_guests.json has one record []. The original file I was using all_guests.json had 6 records separated by newline. I deleted 5 records, (which I already checked to be bookended by brackets) and saved the file under a new name. Then the loads statement worked.

Error was

   raise ValueError(errmsg("Extra data", s, end, len(s)))
ValueError: Extra data: line 2 column 1 - line 10 column 1 (char 261900 - 6964758)

PS. I use the word record, but that’s not the official name. Also, if your file has newline characters like mine, you can loop through it to loads() one record at a time into a json variable.

Well , it might help someone. i just got the same error while my json file is like this

{"id":"1101010","city_id":"1101","name":"TEUPAH SELATAN"}
{"id":"1101020","city_id":"1101","name":"SIMEULUE TIMUR"}

and i found it malformed, so i changed it into somekind of

{
  "datas":[
    {"id":"1101010","city_id":"1101","name":"TEUPAH SELATAN"},
    {"id":"1101020","city_id":"1101","name":"SIMEULUE TIMUR"}
  ]
}

One-liner for your problem:

data = [json.loads(line) for line in open('tweets.json', 'r')]

If you want to solve it in a two-liner you can do it like this:

with open('data.json') as f:
    data = [json.loads(line) for line in f]

I think saving dicts in a list is not an ideal solution here proposed by @falsetru.

Better way is, iterating through dicts and saving them to .json by adding a new line.

our 2 dictionaries are

d1 = {'a':1}

d2 = {'b':2}

you can write them to .json

import json
with open('sample.json','a') as sample:
    for dict in [d1,d2]:
        sample.write('{}\n'.format(json.dumps(dict)))

and you can read json file without any issues

with open('sample.json','r') as sample:
    for line in sample:
        line = json.loads(line.strip())

simple and efficient