json.load vs json.loads

Question

Accepted Answer

The read-side mirrors the write-side: json.loads(s) deserializes a string (the 's' = string), while json.load(f) reads from a file-like object. Calling json.load(s) with a plain string raises AttributeError because load() tries to call s.read(), which strings don't have. This pair (loads/dumps for strings, load/dump for files) is consistent across the json module and worth committing to memory - the same convention is used by pickle, yaml, and most other serialization libraries in Python.