pythonpython-2.7urllib2attributeerror

Why do I get "'str' object has no attribute 'read'" when trying to use `json.load` on a string?

In Python I'm getting an error:

Exception:  (<type 'exceptions.AttributeError'>,
AttributeError("'str' object has no attribute 'read'",), <traceback object at 0x1543ab8>)

Given python code:

def getEntries (self, sub):
    url = 'http://www.reddit.com/'
    if (sub != ''):
        url += 'r/' + sub
    
    request = urllib2.Request (url + 
        '.json', None, {'User-Agent' : 'Reddit desktop client by /user/RobinJ1995/'})
    response = urllib2.urlopen (request)
    jsonStr = response.read()
    
    return json.load(jsonStr)['data']['children']

What does this error mean and what did I do to cause it?

Solution

  • The problem is that for json.load you should pass a file like object with a read function defined. So either you use json.load(response) or json.loads(response.read()).