Reading JSON from urllib2.open and UTF8 characters

Question

I'm reading a JSON with:

# coding: utf8

import urllib2
import json

response = urllib2.urlopen('https://example.com/test.json')
data = json.load(response)

print data['mykey']

# {u'readme': u'Caf\xe9'}

but I see two things:

• Every string is prefixed with u, i.e. type 'unicode'

• \xe9 instead of é

How to do this properly with Python 2.7?

Answer 1

>>> import json
>>> d = {u'readme': u'Caf\xe9'}
>>> json.dumps(d)
'{"readme": "Caf\\u00e9"}'
>>> json.dumps(d, ensure_ascii=False)
'{"readme": "Café"}'