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

I had a JSON dict as a string. The keys and values were unicode objects like in the following example:

myStringDict = "{u'key':u'value'}"

I could use the byteify function suggested above by converting the string to a dict object using ast.literal_eval(myStringDict).