Forcing Python json module to work with ASCII

If you are just dealing with simple JSON objects, you can use the following:

def ascii_encode_dict(data):    ascii_encode = lambda x: x.encode('ascii')    return dict(map(ascii_encode, pair) for pair in data.items())json.loads(json_data, object_hook=ascii_encode_dict)

Here is an example of how it works:

>>> json_data = '{"foo": "bar", "bar": "baz"}'>>> json.loads(json_data)                                # old call gives unicode{u'foo': u'bar', u'bar': u'baz'}>>> json.loads(json_data, object_hook=ascii_encode_dict) # new call gives str{'foo': 'bar', 'bar': 'baz'}

This answer works for a more complex JSON structure, and gives some nice explanation on the object_hook parameter. There is also another answer there that recursively takes the result of a json.loads() call and converts all of the Unicode strings to byte strings.

And if the json object is a mix of datatypes, not only unicode strings, you can use this expression:

def ascii_encode_dict(data):    ascii_encode = lambda x: x.encode('ascii') if isinstance(x, unicode) else x     return dict(map(ascii_encode, pair) for pair in data.items())