Putting Unicode characters in JSON

[Tobiah]

I have some mailing information in a Mysql database that has
characters from various other countries.  The table says that
it's using latin-1 encoding.  I want to send this data out
as JSON.

So I'm just taking each datum and doing 'name'.decode('latin-1')
and adding the resulting Unicode value right into my JSON structure
before doing .dumps() on it.  This seems to work, and I can consume
the JSON with another program and when I print values, they look nice
with the special characters and all.

I was reading though, that JSON files must be encoded with UTF-8.  So
should I be doing string.decode('latin-1').encode('utf-8')?  Or does
the json module do that for me when I give it a unicode object?


Thanks