How do I get rid of the "u" from a decoded JSON object?

Question

I have a dictionary of dictionaries in Python:

d = {"a11y_firesafety.html":{"lang:hi": {"div1": "http://a11y.in/a11y/idea/a11y_firesafety.html:hi"}, "lang:kn": {"div1": "http://a11y.in/a11ypi/idea/a11y_firesafety.html:kn}}}

I have this in a JSON file and I encoded it using json.dumps(). Now when I decode it using json.loads() in Python I get a result like this:

temp = {u'a11y_firesafety.html': {u'lang:hi': {u'div1': u'http://a11y.in/a11ypi/idea/a11y_firesafety.html:hi'}, u'lang:kn': {u'div1': u'http://a11y.in/a11ypi/idea/a11y_firesafety.html:kn'}}}

My problem is with the "u" which signifies the Unicode encoding in front of every item in my temp (dictionary of dictionaries). How to get rid of that "u"?

Answer 1

Why do you care about the 'u' characters? They're just a visual indicator; unless you're actually using the result of str(temp) in your code, they have no effect on your code. For example:

>>> test = u"abcd"
>>> test == "abcd"
True

If they do matter for some reason, and you don't care about consequences like not being able to use this code in an international setting, then you could pass in a custom object_hook (see the json docs here) to produce dictionaries with string contents rather than unicode.