Problem:
How do I do this "json.decoder.jsondecodeerror: expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)"?
Solution:
To summarize the conversation in the comments:
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.
requests offers the most friendly API, including JSON support. If you can, replace your call with:
import requests
return requests.get(url).json()

Solution
Be sure to remember to invoke json.loads() on the contents of the file, as opposed to the file path of that JSON:
json_file_path = "/path/to/example.json"
with open(json_file_path, 'r') as j:
contents = json.loads(j.read())
I think a lot of people are guilty of doing this every once in a while (myself included):
contents = json.loads(json_file_path)
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('\'', '\"')
struct = json.loads(dataform)
except:
print repr(resonse_json)
print sys.exc_info()
A lot of times, this will be because the string you're trying to parse is blank:
>>> import json
>>> x = json.loads("")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.3/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/json/init.py", line 348, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.3/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/json/decoder.py", line 337, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.3/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/json/decoder.py", line 355, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
You can remedy by checking whether json_string is empty beforehand:
import json
if json_string:
x = json.loads(json_string)
else:
# Your code/logic here