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 ran into this problem too, and having to deal with JSON, I came up with a small loop that converts the unicode keys to strings. (simplejson on GAE does not return string keys.)

obj is the object decoded from JSON:

if NAME_CLASS_MAP.has_key(cls):
    kwargs = {}
    for i in obj.keys():
        kwargs[str(i)] = obj[i]
    o = NAME_CLASS_MAP[cls](**kwargs)
    o.save()

kwargs is what I pass to the constructor of the GAE application (which does not like unicode keys in **kwargs)

Not as robust as the solution from Wells, but much smaller.