How to Deal with Malformed JSON

[Bollar]

The JSON returned by the Roomba I'm trying to communicate with is malformed and causes a ValueError exception when using requests.json() or json.loads(). Does anyone have an idea on how to fix/filter/resolve the problem?

Here's a sample string:

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{"ok":{"d":"sun","h":19,"m":22},"id":1"}}

and another:

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{"ok":{"flags":0,"cycle":"none","phase":"charge","pos":{"theta":-90,"point":{"x":-495,"y":792}},"batPct":96,"expireM":0,"rechrgM":0,"error":0,"notReady":0,"mssnM":514,"sqft":999},"id":1"}}

Regardless, they all fail with this error:

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 Error: Parse error on line 21:
...": 999	},	"id": 1 "}}
---------------------^
Expecting 'EOF', '}', ',', ']', got 'undefined'

[jay (support)]

There appear to be 2 problems: the extra quote after the 1 at the end - it doesn't match any other quote, and the extra closing brace at the end. You can attempt to fix those very specific issues, but it seems likely there will be other issues as well. I would contact Roomba and complain that their API is just broken...

[Bollar]

...their API is just broken...

Their API is just unpublished... Hence the workarounds. Any advice?

[matt (support)]

If the problem is always that on the end there is:

"}}

But there should be just:

}

Then you could try parsing the JSON, then if there is the exception you could hack the raw JSON string to force the "}} to be a }, then re-run the parser on it?

[Bollar]

Ah.

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r = requests.post(post_url, json=payload, headers=head, verify=False)

broken = str(r.text)
fixed = broken.replace('"''}','')

Results:

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   Script                          {"ok":{"d":"sun","h":21,"m":45},"id":1"}}
   Script                          {"ok":{"d":"sun","h":21,"m":45},"id":1}