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python requests jsondecodeerror

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Python Requests JSONDecodeError

If you are working with JSON data in your Python application and you are using the Requests library to make HTTP requests, you may come across the JSONDecodeError. This error occurs when the server returns a response with an invalid or empty JSON body.

The error commonly occurs when the server returns a non-JSON-encoded response, such as an HTML or plain text response. To fix this error, you need to ensure that the server returns a JSON-encoded response.

Example Code:


import requests
import json

# Make a request to an API that returns a JSON response
response = requests.get('https://api.example.com/data')

# Check if the response is valid JSON
try:
    data = json.loads(response.text)
except json.decoder.JSONDecodeError as e:
    print(f'Error decoding response: {e}')

In the example code above, we are making a request to an API that returns a JSON response. We then attempt to decode the response using the json.loads() method. If the response is not valid JSON, a JSONDecodeError will be raised and we can handle it accordingly.

Another way to handle this error is to use the requests library's built-in JSON decoder. This can be done by calling the .json() method on the response object.

Example Code:


import requests

# Make a request to an API that returns a JSON response
response = requests.get('https://api.example.com/data')

# Decode the JSON response using the built-in decoder
data = response.json()

In the example code above, we are making a request to an API that returns a JSON response. We then use the built-in decoder by calling the .json() method on the response object.

It's important to note that if the server returns a non-JSON response, the .json() method will raise a ValueError.

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