Using JSON files with the JSON module

To load and decode JSON data, use the json.load() or json.loads() functions. As an example, the following code reads the first 10 lines from the zips.json file and prints them nicely:

import os
import json
from pprint import pprint

with open(os.path.join(data_folder,data_file)) as json_file:
    for line,i in zip(json_file,range(10)):
        json_data = json.loads(line)
        pprint(json_data)

The objects are printed as follows:

{'_id': '01001',
 'city': 'AGAWAM',
 'loc': [-72.622739, 42.070206],
 'pop': 15338,
 'state': 'MA'}

The json.loads() function takes string objects as input while the json.load() function takes file objects as input. Both functions decode the JSON object and load it in the json_data file as a Python dictionary object.

The json.dumps() function takes an object and produces a JSON string, and the json.dump() function takes an object and writes the JSON string to the file. Thus, both these function do the opposite of the json.loads() and json.load() functions.