BUG: All arrays must be of the same length fatal error using pd.read_json()

[kuhlaid]

Pandas version checks

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Reproducible Example

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_json('https://gist.githubusercontent.com/kuhlaid/83da2d0511d57b9a697748837436b93d/raw/9260fd3eb0a6d4a3594350d8d584ab27e52fd3c9/data.json')

print(df)
print("finished")

Issue Description

For some reason pd.read_json() balks at the valid JSON at https://gist.githubusercontent.com/kuhlaid/83da2d0511d57b9a697748837436b93d/raw/9260fd3eb0a6d4a3594350d8d584ab27e52fd3c9/data.json with an All arrays must be of the same length fatal error.

Expected Behavior

Would expect pd.read_json() to read valid JSON object.

Installed Versions

INSTALLED VERSIONS

commit : d9cdd2e
python : 3.11.6.final.0
python-bits : 64
OS : Linux
OS-release : 5.15.146.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2
Version : #1 SMP Thu Jan 11 04:09:03 UTC 2024
machine : x86_64
processor : x86_64
byteorder : little
LC_ALL : en_US.UTF-8
LANG : en_US.UTF-8
LOCALE : en_US.UTF-8

pandas : 2.2.2
numpy : 1.24.4
pytz : 2023.3.post1
dateutil : 2.8.2
setuptools : 68.2.2
pip : 23.3
Cython : 3.0.4
pytest : None
hypothesis : None
sphinx : None
blosc : None
feather : None
xlsxwriter : None
lxml.etree : None
html5lib : None
pymysql : 1.4.6
psycopg2 : None
jinja2 : 3.1.2
IPython : 8.16.1
pandas_datareader : None
adbc-driver-postgresql: None
adbc-driver-sqlite : None
bs4 : 4.12.2
bottleneck : 1.3.7
dataframe-api-compat : None
fastparquet : None
fsspec : 2023.9.2
gcsfs : None
matplotlib : 3.8.0
numba : 0.57.1
numexpr : 2.8.7
odfpy : None
openpyxl : 3.1.2
pandas_gbq : None
pyarrow : 13.0.0
pyreadstat : None
python-calamine : None
pyxlsb : None
s3fs : None
scipy : 1.11.3
sqlalchemy : 2.0.22
tables : 3.9.1
tabulate : None
xarray : None
xlrd : 2.0.1
zstandard : 0.21.0
tzdata : 2023.3
qtpy : None
pyqt5 : None

[Aloqeely]

Thanks for your report! It will be hard to guess what is causing the error since that JSON file is not small.
Could you provide a simpler JSON file that reproduces the error and show why it is a valid JSON object to pass to pd.read_json?

[kuhlaid]

This is a shorter version of the JSON than what I am trying to use. I'm not aware of any different versions or exceptions for JSON validation. I'm only using a validator such as https://jsonlint.com/.

[Aloqeely]

Ah, I see.
Your file is in fact a valid JSON file, but I was talking about whether it is appropriate to pass it to a DataFrame.
Maybe you want to parse it to a dictionary instead? You can do that using the json module.

[kuhlaid]

This is more of a documentation issue than anything or maybe changing the error text is more appropriate. Maybe saying All arrays must be of the same length. Check that your JSON is appropriately organized for conversion to a Dataframe. In other words, the documentation seems to suggest that the read_json function will process any JSON, which it is not meant to do.

[kuhlaid]

Just consider changing the documentation to note the appropriate JSON organization for Dataframes since the organization of the JSON matters. :)