Python Beautiful Soup how to JSON decode to `dict`?

Question

I'm new to BeautifulSoup in Python and I'm trying to extract dict from BeautifulSoup.

I've used BeautifulSoup to extract JSON and got beautifulsoup.beautifulsoup variable soup.

I'm trying to get values out of soup, but when I do result = soup.findAll("bill") I get an empty list []. How can I extract soup to get dict result of:

{u'congress': 113,
 u'number': 325,
 u'title': u'A bill to ensure the complete and timely payment of the obligations of the United States Government until May 19, 2013, and for other purposes.',
 u'type': u'hr'}


print type(soup)
print soup 

=> result below

BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup

{
  "bill": {
    "congress": 113, 
    "number": 325, 
    "title": "A bill to ensure the complete and timely payment of the obligations of the United States Government until May 19, 2013, and for other purposes.", 
    "type": "hr"
  }, 
  "category": "passage", 
  "chamber": "s"
}

---

UPDATE

Here is how I got soup:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

import urllib2 
url = urllib2.urlopen("https://www.govtrack.us/data/congress/113/votes/2013/s11/data.json")
content = url.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(content)

Answer 1

Not very familiar with BeautifulSoup but if you just need to decode JSON

import json

newDictionary=json.loads(str(soup))

Answer 2

You could remove BeautifulSoup:

import json
import urllib2

url = "https://www.govtrack.us/data/congress/113/votes/2013/s11/data.json"
data = json.load(urllib2.urlopen(url))