BOM in server response screws up json parsing

Question

I\'m trying to write a Python script that posts some JSON to a web server and gets some JSON back. I patched together a few different examples on StackOverflow, and I think

Answer 1

You should probably yell at whoever's running this service, because a BOM on UTF-8 text makes no sense. The BOM exists to disambiguate byte order, and UTF-8 is defined as being little-endian.

That said, ideally you should decode bytes before doing anything else with them. Luckily, Python has a codec that recognizes and removes the BOM: utf-8-sig.

>>> '\xef\xbb\xbffoo'.decode('utf-8-sig')
u'foo'

So you just need:

data = json.loads(response.decode('utf-8-sig'))