Python return a string by json

Question

I got a problem, first I made a api that accepts a post request,
then responds with JSON as a result.

Post request data had been encoded, I accepted the post data, and got the data
rightly, then I response with the new data in JSON format.

But when I returned the JSON, I found that the string is unicode format, e.g.

{
  'a':'\u00e3\u0080'
}

but, I want to get a format like this:

{
  'a':"ã"
}

I want this format because I found that this unicode format didn't work well in IE8.

Yes, IE8.

What can I do for this issue? Thanks!

Answer 1

If you're using standard library json module, specifying ensure_ascii=False give you what you want.

For example:

>>> print json.dumps({'a': u'ã'})
{"a": "\u00e3"}
>>> print json.dumps({'a': u'ã'}, ensure_ascii=False)
{"a": "ã"}

According to json.dump documentation:

If ensure_ascii is True (the default), all non-ASCII characters in the output are escaped with \uXXXX sequences, and the result is a str instance consisting of ASCII characters only. If ensure_ascii is False, some chunks written to fp may be unicode instances. This usually happens because the input contains unicode strings or the encoding parameter is used. ...

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BTW, what do you mean "unicode format didn't work well in IE8," ?