ENH: read_json behaviour with bytes object

[abdulniyaspm]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

The latest version of pandas.read_json does not directly operate on bytes object.

pandas version 1.1.4

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> pd.__version__
'1.1.4'
>>> df = pd.read_json(b'{"col": [1, 2, 3]}')
>>> df
   col
0    1
1    2
2    3

pandas version 1.4.0

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> pd.__version__
'1.4.0'
>>>
>>> df = pd.read_json(b'{"col": [1, 2, 3]}')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
..... # Skipped traceback for brevity
raise TypeError(
TypeError: Expected file path name or file-like object, got <class 'bytes'> type

Describe the solution you'd like

I don't know the discussion that leads to the removal of this behavior from the latest releases, but I would like the latest version behave exactly same as version 1.1.4.

API breaking implications

I don't think that this will affect the API, but we may need to update the documentation.

Describe alternatives you've considered

We need to wrap the bytes within in-memory bytes buffer(BytesIO) to get the expected behavior.

>>> import pandas as pd
>>>
>>> pd.__version__
'1.4.0'
>>>
>>> from io import BytesIO
>>> df = pd.read_json(BytesIO(b'{"col": [1, 2, 3]}'))
>>> df
   col
0    1
1    2
2    3

But I would like pandas to do this work implicitly like in this case.

Additional context

pandas read_json behavior with bytes object

[jreback]

cc @twoertwein

[twoertwein]

I don't think that this will affect the API, but we may need to update the documentation.

read_json is not documented to support bytes. If it is intended that read_json should accept bytes, you probably need to add bytes to this isinstance checks and likely an if-statement here to convert it to StringIO(filepath_or_buffer.decode(encoding, errors=encoding_errors))

Personally, I'm not a fan of accepting both content and file handles (but read_json unfortunately already accepts json-strings).

[jreback]

yeah i believe we not accept bytes here as json is by definition a string format (all that said it can surely come over the wire as bytes, but that is a boundry that the user should cross)

[mroeschke]

Thanks for the request, but agreed I think not accepting bytes was an intentional decision due to json's definition. Closing as it appears there's not a lot of support to change this