Sometimes, we want to get string objects instead of Unicode from JSON with Python.

In this article, we’ll look at how to get string objects instead of Unicode from JSON with Python.

How to get string objects instead of Unicode from JSON with Python?

To get string objects instead of Unicode from JSON with Python, we can use PyYAML to parse the JSON instead of the json module.

This is because JSON is a subset of YAML.

To install it, we run:

pip install PyYAML

Then we can call the safe_load method to parse a JSON string into string objects:

import json
import yaml

list_org = ['a', 'b']
list_dump = json.dumps(list_org)
a = yaml.safe_load(list_dump)
print(a)

We convert the list_org list to JSON with json.dumps.

Then we call yaml.safe_load on list_dump to return list parsed from the list_dump JSON string.

Therefore, a is:

['a', 'b']

and both strings are regular strings.

Conclusion

To get string objects instead of Unicode from JSON with Python, we can use PyYAML to parse the JSON instead of the json module.

This is because JSON is a subset of YAML.