My guess is that dJSON
object does not contain pure unicode but it contains mix of unicode and strings already encoded as utf-8
e.g. this fails
>>> d = {u'name':u'पाइथन'.encode('utf-8')}
>>> json.dumps(d, encoding='utf-8', ensure_ascii=False)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 238, in dumps
**kw).encode(obj)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 204, in encode
return ''.join(chunks)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe0 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
But this works (everything unicode)
>>> d = {u'name':u'पाइथन'}
>>> json.dumps(d, encoding='utf-8', ensure_ascii=False)
u'{"name": "\u092a\u093e\u0907\u0925\u0928"}
Though this also works (everything string)
>>> d = {'name':u'पाइथन'.encode('utf-8')}
>>> json.dumps(d, encoding='utf-8', ensure_ascii=False)
'{"name": "\xe0\xa4\xaa\xe0\xa4\xbe\xe0\xa4\x87\xe0\xa4\xa5\xe0\xa4\xa8"}'