How do I process this using Python?

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Anthony Papillion <papillion at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/31/2013 06:48 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Anthony Papillion <papillion at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I'm writing a processor for Bitmessage messages and I am needing to
>>> parse the following returned JSON string:
>>>
>>> {u'inboxMessages':
>>
>> Does the JSON string really have those u prefixes and apostrophes?
>> That's not valid JSON. You may be able to use ast.literal_eval() on it
>> - I was able to with the example data - but not a JSON parser. Can you
>> sort out your transmission end?
>>
>> ChrisA
>
> I think I remembered what the 'u' prefix is. It indicates that the data
> following is a unicode string. So could that be valid JSON data wrapped
> up in unicode?

No; JSON already supports Unicode. What you may have is an incorrect
JSON encoder that uses Python's repr() to shortcut its work - but it's
wrong JSON.

But bitmessage seems to be written in Python. Can you simply access
the objects it's giving you, rather than going via text strings?

ChrisA