Saving utf-8 texts in json.dumps as UTF8, not as \u escape sequence

Question

sample code:

>>> import json
>>> json_string = json.dumps(\"ברי צקלה\")
>>> print json_string
\"\\u05d1\\u05e8\\u05d9 \\u05e6\\u05         


        

Answer 1

Using ensure_ascii=False in json.dumps is the right direction to solve this problem, as pointed out by Martijn. However, this may raise an exception:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe7 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

You need extra settings in either site.py or sitecustomize.py to set your sys.getdefaultencoding() correct. site.py is under lib/python2.7/ and sitecustomize.py is under lib/python2.7/site-packages.

If you want to use site.py, under def setencoding(): change the first if 0: to if 1: so that python will use your operation system's locale.

If you prefer to use sitecustomize.py, which may not exist if you haven't created it. simply put these lines:

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

Then you can do some Chinese json output in utf-8 format, such as:

name = {"last_name": u"王"}
json.dumps(name, ensure_ascii=False)

You will get an utf-8 encoded string, rather than \u escaped json string.

To verify your default encoding:

print sys.getdefaultencoding()

You should get "utf-8" or "UTF-8" to verify your site.py or sitecustomize.py settings.

Please note that you could not do sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8") at interactive python console.