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

So, I've run into the same problem. Guess what was the first Google result.

Because I need to pass all data to PyGTK, unicode strings aren't very useful to me either. So I have another recursive conversion method. It's actually also needed for typesafe JSON conversion - json.dump() would bail on any non-literals, like Python objects. Doesn't convert dict indexes though.

# removes any objects, turns unicode back into str
def filter_data(obj):
        if type(obj) in (int, float, str, bool):
                return obj
        elif type(obj) == unicode:
                return str(obj)
        elif type(obj) in (list, tuple, set):
                obj = list(obj)
                for i,v in enumerate(obj):
                        obj[i] = filter_data(v)
        elif type(obj) == dict:
                for i,v in obj.iteritems():
                        obj[i] = filter_data(v)
        else:
                print "invalid object in data, converting to string"
                obj = str(obj) 
        return obj