JSON decode issue

Question

I'm trying to decode JSON output of a Java program (jackson) and having some issues. The cause of the problem is the following snippet:

{
    "description": "... lives\uMOVE™ OFFERS ",
}

Which causes ValueError: Invalid \uXXXX escape.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

EDIT: The output is from an Avro file, the Avro package uses jackson to emit records as JSON.
EDIT2: After poking about in the source files, it might be the case that the JSON is constructed manually (sorry jackson).

Answer 1

What's the original string supposed to look like? \uXXXX is a unicode escape sequence, so it's interpreting \uMOVE as a single character, but it's not a valid unicode value. JSON is always assumed to be unicode, so you'll likely need to fix the string in the originating app

Answer 2

Try quoting the \u like this:

{
    "description": "... lives\\uMOVE™ OFFERS ", 
}