AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'loads'

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'loads' #

The "AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'loads'" occurs when we call the loads() method on a string. To solve the error, make sure you aren't overriding the json module and call the loads method on the module, e.g. json.loads(...).

Here is an example of how the error occurs.

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import json

# 👇️ overriding json module setting it to a string
json = '{"name": "Alice", "age": 30}'

# ⛔️ AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'loads'
result = json.loads(json)

The issue in the code snippet is that we reassigned the json module to a string and tried to call the loads() method on the string.

To solve the error, make sure you aren't reassigning the json module in your code and call the loads() method on the module.

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import json

my_json = '{"name": "Alice", "age": 30}'

result = json.loads(my_json)

print(result)  # 👉️ {'name': 'Alice', 'age': 30}

The json.loads method parses a JSON string into a native Python object.

If the data being parsed is not a valid JSON string, a JSONDecodeError is raised.

Alternatively, you can import the loads method from the json module if the json variable is shadowed in your code.

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from json import loads

my_json = '{"name": "Alice", "age": 30}'

result = loads(my_json)

print(result)  # 👉️ {'name': 'Alice', 'age': 30}

The example only imports the loads() method from the json module, so it would work even if you are redefining json in your code.

A good way to start debugging is to print(dir(your_object)) and see what attributes a string has.

Here is an example of what printing the attributes of a string looks like.

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my_string = 'hello world'

# [ 'capitalize', 'casefold', 'center', 'count', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'format',
#  'format_map', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isascii', 'isdecimal', 'isdigit', 'isidentifier',
#  'islower', 'isnumeric', 'isprintable', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower',
#  'lstrip', 'maketrans', 'partition', 'removeprefix', 'removesuffix', 'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex',
#  'rjust', 'rpartition', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase',
#  'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill']
print(dir(my_string))

If you pass a class to the dir() function, it returns a list of names of the class's attributes, and recursively of the attributes of its bases.

Since the str object doesn't implement a loads() method, the error is caused.

Conclusion #

The "AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'loads'" occurs when we call the loads() method on a string. To solve the error, make sure you aren't overriding the json module and call the loads method on the module, e.g. json.loads(...).