JSONDecodeError: Expected value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) When running Python code, you are trying to decode an invalid JSON string.
This error can occur in three different cases:
Case 1: Decoding invalid JSON content Case 2: Loading an empty or invalid .json file Case 3: The request you made did not return valid JSON
The following article shows how to resolve this error in each case.
1. Decoding invalid JSON content
You must pass valid JSON content when calling the load() or loads() function in the Python json library.
Suppose you pass the loads() function a string like this:
data = ‘{“name”: Nathan}’
res = json.loads(data);
Because the loads() function expects a valid JSON string, the above code raises this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
file…
res = json.loads(data);
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expected value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
To resolve this error, you must ensure that the JSON string you pass to the loads() function is valid.
You can try skipping the block to check if your data is a valid JSON string:
data = ‘{“name”: Nathan}’
Try:
res = json.loads(data);
print(“Data is a valid JSON string”)
except json.decoder.JSONDecodeError:
print(“Data is not a valid JSON string”);
By trying to skip the block, you can catch when the JSON string is invalid.
However, the loads() function needs to find out why an invalid JSON string is passed.
Most likely, there is a typo somewhere in your JSON string like above.
Note that the value Nathan is not enclosed in double quotes:
data = ‘{“name”: Nathan}’ # ❌ error
data = ‘{“name”: “Nathan”}’ # ✅ true
If you see this in your code, you need to modify the data to match the JSON standard.
2. You are loading an empty or invalid JSON file
Another case where this error can occur is when you load an empty .json file.
Suppose you are trying to load a file called data.json with the following code:
With open(“data.json”, “r”) as file:
data = json.loads(file.read())
If the data.json file is empty, Python will respond with an error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
file…
data = json.loads(file.read())
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expected value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
The same error also occurs if your file contains invalid JSON content such as:
To avoid this error, you need to ensure that the .json file you are loading is not empty and contains valid JSON content.
To catch this error you can try to skip the block in this case:
Try:
With open(“data.json”, “r”) as file:
data = json.loads(file.read())
print(“File contains valid JSON content”)
except json.decoder.JSONDecodeError:
print(“File is empty or contains invalid JSON”)
If you want to validate the source file you can use jsonlint.com.
3. The request you made did not return valid JSON
When you send an HTTP request using the Requests library, you can use the .json() method from the response object to extract the JSON content:
Import requests
response = requests.get(‘https://api.github.com’)
data = response.json()
print (data)
But if the response object does not contain a valid JSON encoding, a JSONDecodeError will be raised:
Traceback (most recent call last):
…
While handling the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
file…
data = response.json()
requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError: Expected value: line 7 column 1 (char 6)
As you can see, the request object also has a JSONDecodeError: value line 7 column 1 message expected.
To fix this error, you need to try to block the call to response.json() as follows:
Import requests
response = requests.get(‘https://api.github.com’)
Try:
data = response.json()
print (data)
Besides:
print(“Error from server: ” + str(response.content))
When the exception block is triggered, you will get the response content printed in string format.
You need to check the print output for more information on why the response is not a valid JSON format.
Conclusion
In this article, we looked at how to resolve JSONDecodeError: Expected value error when using Python.
This error can occur in three different cases: When you decode invalid JSON content, load an empty or invalid .json file, and make an HTTP request that does not return valid JSON. JSONDecodeError: Required value: line 1 column 1 (星 0) You are trying to decode an invalid JSON string when running Python code
This error can occur in three cases:
Case 1: Decoding invalid JSON content Case 2: Loading an empty or invalid .json file Case 3: The request you make does not return valid JSON
The following article shows how to fix this error in each case
1. Incorrect decoding of JSON content
You must pass valid JSON content when calling the load() or loads() function in the Python json library
The oad() function is passed a string like this:
data = ‘{“Chii”: Nathan}’
res = json.loads(data);
No