How to get string objects instead of Unicode from JSON?

Question

I\'m using Python 2 to parse JSON from ASCII encoded text files.

When loading these files with either json or simplejson, all my

Answer 1

You can use the object_hook parameter for json.loads to pass in a converter. You don't have to do the conversion after the fact. The json module will always pass the object_hook dicts only, and it will recursively pass in nested dicts, so you don't have to recurse into nested dicts yourself. I don't think I would convert unicode strings to numbers like Wells shows. If it's a unicode string, it was quoted as a string in the JSON file, so it is supposed to be a string (or the file is bad).

Also, I'd try to avoid doing something like str(val) on a unicode object. You should use value.encode(encoding) with a valid encoding, depending on what your external lib expects.

So, for example:

def _decode_list(data):
    rv = []
    for item in data:
        if isinstance(item, unicode):
            item = item.encode('utf-8')
        elif isinstance(item, list):
            item = _decode_list(item)
        elif isinstance(item, dict):
            item = _decode_dict(item)
        rv.append(item)
    return rv

def _decode_dict(data):
    rv = {}
    for key, value in data.iteritems():
        if isinstance(key, unicode):
            key = key.encode('utf-8')
        if isinstance(value, unicode):
            value = value.encode('utf-8')
        elif isinstance(value, list):
            value = _decode_list(value)
        elif isinstance(value, dict):
            value = _decode_dict(value)
        rv[key] = value
    return rv

obj = json.loads(s, object_hook=_decode_dict)