Python: Assistance with json and reading from a file

Question

Say i have a notepad file (.txt) with the following content:

"Hello I am really bad at programming"

Using json, how would I get the sentence from the file to the python program which I can then use as a variable?

So far I have this code:

newfile = open((compfilename)+'.txt', 'r')

saveddata = json.load(newfile)

orgsentence = saveddata[0]

I always get this error:

   return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
   UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 0:           ordinal not in range(128)

Thanks in advance for any help!

newfile = open((compfilename)+'.txt', 'r') saveddata = json.load(newfile) orgsentence = saveddata[0] — Kronixion, Apr 01 '17 at 08:36
Please edit your question instead of posting the code in your comments! — Thierry Lathuille, Apr 01 '17 at 08:37
You can check http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2835559/parsing-values-from-a-json-file-using-python. If you got any error, edit your question and write it as well. — manvi77, Apr 01 '17 at 08:39
i have added the code I am using as well as the error message i am getting @manvi77 — Kronixion, Apr 01 '17 at 08:46
It sounds like your file doesn't have plain ASCII quotes (`"`) but rather fancy opening quotes. Try replacing them. — Alex Hall, Apr 01 '17 at 08:53
Did Alex Hall's suggestion fix your problem? If not, please run `print(repr(open(compfilename+'.txt', 'rb').read()))` and paste the output into your question. BTW, what version of Python are you using? — PM 2Ring, Apr 01 '17 at 09:08
@AlexHall Thanks it works now! Is there any way of having plain ASCII quotes on Mac because the only ones I am getting are the fancy quotes. — Kronixion, Apr 01 '17 at 12:04

manvi77 · Answer 1 · 2017-04-01T09:00:53.290

Though you are using txt file. You could read this file without json. But as you mentioned in the question, you can try like this

hello.txt

"Hello I am really bad at programming"

To read this txt file,

import json
from pprint import pprint

with open('hello.txt') as myfile:
    mydata = json.load(myfile) #to load json
    print myfile.read() #to print contents on stdout, not using json load

pprint(mydata)

Output:

u'Hello I am really bad at programming'

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 01 '17 at 09:49

0

import json

with open('file.txt') as f:
    data = json.load(f)

answered Apr 01 '17 at 09:49

dimmg

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Python: Assistance with json and reading from a file

2 Answers2