I'm pretty opposed to the idea of adding this functionality *specifically for JSON*, because JSON loading is not the only use case that could benefit from the convenience and reduced verbosity.
I propose the following (including type annotations and tests): https://repl.it/@maximum__/loadfile#main.py Short version below: def loadfile(path, encoding='utf-8', loader=methodcaller('read')): """ Load data from a file, using a given "loader" """ with open(path, 'r', encoding=encoding) as fp: return loader(fp) So for the JSON use case, you would write: data = loadfile('data.json', loader=json.load) This is still shorter and more readable than the with-open idiom, but also lets ANYONE benefit from the new convenience, including people who might want to load data from various other file formats (YAML, TOML, CSV, etc. etc. etc.) or even just plain Unicode or binary streams. As a side effect, it also fixes the "what to call it" problem, and more importantly fixes the "how to delegate args to open() vs to json.load()" problem. loadfile() would pass along its kwargs to open(), and the user could use lambda, partial, or write a utility function to customize the loader itself. If we are really really leery of adding a new top-level builtin, you could namespace it under a "loadfile" module: from loadfile import loadfile Although having to explicitly import the thing somewhat cuts into the beginner-friendliness aspect. -Greg Werbin _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/QXT5C7OFMCNPJL3QFN7GIP67DWUO7K32/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
