Verify if a String is JSON in python?

Question

I have a string in Python, I want to know if it is valid JSON.

json.loads(mystring) will raise an error if the string is not JSON but I don\'t want to

Answer 1

To verify the string would require parsing it - so if you checked then converted it would literally take twice as long. Catching the exception is the best way. Interestingly, you can still use an if-else style expression:

try:
    json_object = json.loads(json_string)
except ValueError, e:
    pass # invalid json
else:
    pass # valid json