JSON string decoding error

Question

I am calling the URL :

http://code.google.com/feeds/issues/p/chromium/issues/full/291?alt=json

using urllib2 and decoding using the json module

url = "http://code.google.com/feeds/issues/p/chromium/issues/full/291?alt=json"
request = urllib2.Request(query)
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
issue_report = json.loads(response.read())

I run into the following error :

ValueError: Invalid control character at: line 1 column 1120 (char 1120)

I tried checking the header and I got the following :

Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Expires: Sun, 03 Jul 2011 17:38:38 GMT
Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2011 17:38:38 GMT
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0, must-revalidate, no-transform
Vary: Accept, X-GData-Authorization, GData-Version
GData-Version: 1.0
ETag: W/"CUEGQX47eCl7ImA9WxJaFEw."
Last-Modified: Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:20:20 GMT
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Server: GSE
Connection: close

I also tried adding an encoding parameter as follows :

issue_report = json.loads(response.read() , encoding = 'UTF-8')

I still run into the same error.

It looks like that what you get is not a valid json encoded string. — hakre
– hakre, Commented Jul 3, 2011 at 17:48

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-03 17:49:45Z

4

The feed has raw data from a JPEG in it at that point; the JSON is malformed, so it's not your fault. Report a bug to Google.

answered Jul 3, 2011 at 17:49

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

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1 Comment

Dexter Over a year ago

Oh! I suspect people have run into such issues earlier too. code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=942

Zach Kelling · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-03 18:19:21Z

2

You could consider using lxml instead, since the JSON is malformed. It's XPath support makes working with XML pretty straight-forward:

import lxml.etree
url = 'http://code.google.com/feeds/issues/p/chromium/issues/full/291'
doc = lxml.etree.parse(url)
ns = {'issues': 'http://schemas.google.com/projecthosting/issues/2009'}
issues = doc.xpath('//issues:*', namespaces=ns)

Fairly easy to manipulate elements, for instance to strip namespace from tags, convert to dict:

>>> dict((x.tag[len(ns['issues'])+2:], x.text) for x in issues)
<<<    
{'closedDate': '2009-08-04T19:20:20.000Z',
 'id': '291',
 'label': 'Area-BrowserUI',
 'stars': '13',
 'state': 'closed',
 'status': 'Verified'}

answered Jul 3, 2011 at 18:19

Zach Kelling

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2 Comments

Dexter Over a year ago

Thanks but I always prefer JSON objects since they are very easily converted into dictionaries.

Zach Kelling Over a year ago

I prefer JSON too, but sometimes you don't have a choice.

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