Petri Lehtinen added the comment: It seems to me that when ensure_ascii is False, the return value will be a unicode instance if and only if there's a unicode object anywhere in the input.
>>> json.dumps({'foo': 'bar'}, ensure_ascii=False) '{"foo": "bar"}' >>> json.dumps({'foo': u'bar'}, ensure_ascii=False) u'{"foo": "bar"}' >>> json.dumps({'foo': u'äiti'}, ensure_ascii=False) u'{"foo": "\xe4iti"}' >>> json.dumps({'foo': u'äiti'.encode('utf-8')}, ensure_ascii=False) '{"foo": "\xc3\xa4iti"}' >>> json.dumps({'foo': u'äiti'.encode('utf-16')}, ensure_ascii=False) '{"foo": "\xff\xfe\xe4\\u0000i\\u0000t\\u0000i\\u0000"}' ---------- nosy: +petri.lehtinen _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue13769> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com