Your code produced an empty response body, you’d want to check for that or catch the exception raised. It is possible the server responded with a 204 No Content response, or a non-200-range status code was returned (404 Not Found, etc.). Check for this.
Note:
There is no need to use simplejson library, the same library is included with Python as the json module.
There is no need to decode a response from UTF8 to unicode, the simplejson / json .loads() method can handle UTF8 encoded data natively.
pycurl has a very archaic API. Unless you have a specific requirement for using it, there are better choices.
Either the requests or httpx offers much friendlier APIs, including JSON support. If you can, replace your call with:
import requests
response = requests.get(url)
response.raise_for_status() # raises exception when not a 2xx response
if response.status_code != 204:
return response.json()
Of course, this won’t protect you from a URL that doesn’t comply with HTTP standards; when using arbirary URLs where this is a possibility, check if the server intended to give you JSON by checking the Content-Type header, and for good measure catch the exception:
if (
response.status_code != 204 and
response.headers[“content-type”].strip().startswith(“application/json”)
):
try:
return response.json()
except ValueError:
# decide how to handle a server that’s misbehaving to this extent
Check the response data-body, whether actual data is present and a data-dump appears to be well-formatted.
In most cases your json.loads- JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) error is due to :
non-JSON conforming quoting
XML/HTML output (that is, a string starting with <), or
incompatible character encoding
Ultimately the error tells you that at the very first position the string already doesn't conform to JSON.
As such, if parsing fails despite having a data-body that looks JSON like at first glance, try replacing the quotes of the data-body:
import sys, json
struct = {}
try:
try: #try parsing to dict
dataform = str(response_json).strip("'<>() “).replace(”’, ‘”‘)