Let JSON object accept bytes or let urlopen output strings
HTTP sends bytes. If the resource in question is text, the character encoding is normally specified, either by the Content-Type HTTP header or by another mechanism (an RFC, HTML meta http-equiv,...).
urllib should know how to encode the bytes to a string, but it's too naïve—it's a horribly underpowered and un-Pythonic library.
Dive Into Python 3 provides an overview about the situation.
Your "work-around" is fine—although it feels wrong, it's the correct way to do it.
I have come to opinion that the question is the best answer :)
import jsonfrom urllib.request import urlopenresponse = urlopen("site.com/api/foo/bar").read().decode('utf8')obj = json.loads(response)