JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1

Question

I am receiving this error in Python 3.5.1.

json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Here is my code:<

Answer 1

If you look at the output you receive from print() and also in your Traceback, you'll see the value you get back is not a string, it's a bytes object (prefixed by b):

b'{\n  "note":"This file    .....

If you fetch the URL using a tool such as curl -v, you will see that the content type is

Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

So it's JSON, encoded as UTF-8, and Python is considering it a byte stream, not a simple string. In order to parse this, you need to convert it into a string first.

Change the last line of code to this:

info = json.loads(js.decode("utf-8"))