Can json.loads ignore trailing commas?

Question

As mentioned in this StackOverflow question, you are not allowed to have any trailing commas in json. For example, this

{
    \"key1\": \"value1\",
    \"key         


        

Answer 1

In python you can have trailing commas inside of dictionaries and lists, so we should be able to take advantage of this using ast.literal_eval:

import ast, json

str = '{"key1": "value1", "key2": "value2",}'

python_obj = ast.literal_eval(str) 
# python_obj is {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}

json_str = json.dumps(python_obj)
# json_str is '{"key1": "value1", "key2": "value2"}'

However, JSON isn't exactly python so there are a few edge cases to this. For example, values like null, true, false don't exist in python. We can replace those with valid python equivalents before we run the eval:

import ast, json

def clean_json(str):
  str = str.replace('null', 'None').replace('true', 'True').replace('false', 'False')
  return json.dumps(ast.literal_eval(str))

This will unfortunately mangle any strings that have the words null, true, or false in them.

{"sentence": "show your true colors"} 

would become

{"sentence": "show your True colors"}