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

There exists an easy work-around.

TL;DR - Use ast.literal_eval() instead of json.loads(). Both ast and json are in the standard library.

While not a 'perfect' answer, it gets one pretty far if your plan is to ignore Unicode altogether. In Python 2.7

import json, ast
d = { 'field' : 'value' }
print "JSON Fail: ", json.loads(json.dumps(d))
print "AST Win:", ast.literal_eval(json.dumps(d))

gives:

JSON Fail:  {u'field': u'value'}
AST Win: {'field': 'value'}

This gets more hairy when some objects are really Unicode strings. The full answer gets hairy quickly.