Run the following Python JSON parsing script on valid JSON:

import json
json.loads( '["[\"Residential | Furniture | Cabinets\",\"119.99\"]"]' )

Result:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Python33\lib\json\__init__.py", line 319, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "C:\Python33\lib\json\decoder.py", line 352, in decode
    obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
  File "C:\Python33\lib\json\decoder.py", line 368, in raw_decode
    obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx)
ValueError: Expecting ',' delimiter: line 1 column 5 (char 4)

It is not a valid JSON. You may want to validate it against http://jsonlint.com/

What you have inside the string (single quotes) is the JSON representation but not the string representation which json.loads is supposed to parse.

You need to escape backslashes inside a Python string literal or use raw-string literals:

  >>> import json
  >>> json.loads(r'["[\"Residential | Furniture | Cabinets\",\"119.99\"]"]')
  [u'["Residential | Furniture | Cabinets","119.99"]']

If the backslashes are unintentional then you could remove them:

  >>> json.loads('[["Residential | Furniture | Cabinets","119.99"]]')
  [[u'Residential | Furniture | Cabinets', u'119.99']]

Note: the result is different