Why does json.dumps escape non-ascii characters with “\uxxxx”

Question

In Python 2, the function json.dumps() will ensure that all non-ascii characters are escaped as \\uxxxx.

Python 2 Json

But isn\'t

Answer 1

That's exactly the point. You get a byte string back, not a Unicode string. Thus the Unicode characters need to be escaped to survive. The escaping is allowed by JSON and thus presents a safe way of representing Unicode characters.