Good cross-version ASCII serialisation protocol for simple types

[Paul Moore]

On Saturday, 23 February 2013 16:06:11 UTC, Jussi Piitulainen  wrote:
> I don't know much of these things but I've been using Python's
> json.dump and json.load for a couple of weeks now and they seem to use
> ASCII-friendly escapes automatically, writing a four-character string
> as "\u00e4\u00e4ni" instead of using the UTF-8 characters that my
> environment is set to handle.

Thanks. When I tried to write a short program to demo what I was doing, I realised that my problem was actually with my test code, not with json. Here's my test code:

import json, subprocess
CODE="""
import json
p = {'x': '\N{EURO SIGN}'}
print json.dumps(p)
"""
data_bytes = subprocess.check_output(['py', '-2', '-c', CODE])
data = json.loads(data_bytes.decode('ASCII'))
print(data)

The problem is that I'm not using a raw string for CODE, so the Euro sign is being put into the string literally, and that causes all sorts of encoding-related fun that I didn't intend!

As you say, json actually works fine for this application, so thanks for pointing that out. I thought it shouldn't need to be as hard as I was making it!!!

Paul.