Putting Unicode characters in JSON

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 6:46 AM, Tobiah <toby at tobiah.org> wrote:
> 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?

Reconfigure your MySQL database to use UTF-8. There is no reason to
use Latin-1 in the database.

If that isn't an option, make sure your JSON files are pure ASCII,
which is the common subset of UTF-8 and Latin-1.

ChrisA