From b1b38d8902c949e243cceba40c70ef7b3e604962 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Mayank Basena <0mayankbasena@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2026 16:48:50 +0530
Subject: [PATCH] gh-59598: Strip leading whitespace in JSONDecoder.raw_decode

raw_decode currently ignores leading whitespace before JSON values,
raising JSONDecodeError on strings like '  {"key": "value"}'. This is
inconsistent with JSONDecoder.decode() which handles leading whitespace.

Add s = s.lstrip() at the start of raw_decode to strip leading
whitespace before decoding, matching the behavior of decode().
---
 Lib/json/decoder.py | 2 ++
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Lib/json/decoder.py b/Lib/json/decoder.py
index 364e44d40cc3073..803a7ff0e68e815 100644
--- a/Lib/json/decoder.py
+++ b/Lib/json/decoder.py
@@ -370,6 +370,8 @@ def raw_decode(self, s, idx=0):
         have extraneous data at the end.
 
         """
+        s = s.lstrip()
+
         try:
             obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx)
         except StopIteration as err: