Parsing json string representation with delimited double quote marks and booleans in python

Question

This seems so basic that I can't believe I haven't found a simple solution. I am trying to evaluate a json string representation in python which contains backslash delimited double quote marks and boolean values.

eg s = "{\"data\":true}" .

This is valid json in javascript as JSON.parse("{\"data\":true}") returns a valid object.

I've tried multiple methods, none of which provide the desired solution of a pythonised string representation of a json object:

Using eval(s) gives NameError: name 'true' is not defined .

Using ast.literal_eval(s) gives ValueError: malformed string .

Using json.dumps(json.loads(s)) returns the same format of string.

The output I want is "{'data':True}" as my neo4j database does not recognise \ as a delimiter for storing purposes and therefore produces an error when attempting to store the initial format. I am trying to avoid a hard replace of \" with ' or true with True as there must be a better, faster and easier solution to this.

Answer 1

Use json.loads :

import json

result = str(json.loads("{\"data\":true}"))
print(result, type(result))

Output

{'data': True} <class 'str'>