title: Loading json file and decoding in UTF-16
body: <p>This is a better way of wording my question:</p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to read a <code>utf-16</code> characters (English and Arabic) from a <code>.json.gz</code> file in python 2.7.  </p>
  
  <p>The code lines that I have written read <code>utf-8</code> characters:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-py prettyprint-override"><code>import glob
  import json
  import gzip
  
  print("Reading input JSON files")
      for filename in glob.glob("*api*.json.gz"):
          with gzip.open(filename,'r') as f:
              data = json.loads(f.read().decode('utf-8'))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried a simple replacement of <code>utf-8</code> to <code>utf-16</code>, but I got this error:</p>
  
  <p><code>ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded</code></p>
  
  <p>Any help would be appreciated. </p>