Question

I am trying to make an API call to http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/badges/name

My code snippet –

url = 'http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/badges/name'
f = urllib2.urlopen(url)
content = f.read()
jsonobj = json.loads(content)
print jsonobj

This gives me the error –
ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded

When I tried http://jsonviewer.stack.hu to load the json object from the above URL, it showed me garbled characters. You can see the output here – http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/#http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/badges/name

The text is displayed normally in the browser window if you go to http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/badges/name

I tried adding UTF-8 encoding –

jsonobj = json.loads(content, encoding = 'UTF-8')

but it still gives the same error.

Answer 1

According to http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.0/usage the returned information is gzipped. You will have to unzip the binary data to get the actual JSON. You can do this with the gzip and StringIO modules:

url = urllib2.urlopen('http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/badges/name')
zippedContents = url.read()
sio = StringIO.StringIO(zippedContents)
gz = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=sio)
print gz.read()