Python json.dumps() doesn't encode emojis properly

Question

Why does json.dumps() encode emojis into unicode? See code and output below:

import json
obj = {"key": "hello "}
print(obj)

{'key': 'hello '}

print(json.dumps(obj))

'{"key": "hello \ud83d\ude00"}'

I have tried print(json.dumps(obj)).encode('utf-8') and some variants (.decode()...) but it didn't change the output much. Im working on Python 3.6.1

have a look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25707222/print-python-emoji-as-unicode-string — Chetan Ameta, Jul 05 '18 at 05:32
@ChetanAmeta Thanks but this shows how to go from smiley to \ud83... not the other way around — Thomas, Jul 05 '18 at 05:36
@Thomas do you want to load from \ud83 to smiley ? is this your requirement ? — Murali, Jul 05 '18 at 05:49
@Thomas In that case dump it normally to a file, but when you load it mention the encoding as "utf-8". doesn't it solve your problem? — Murali, Jul 06 '18 at 06:00

score 12 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 05 '18 at 05:31

12

print(json.dumps(obj, ensure_ascii=False))

However, the ASCII variant is more portable, since you are almost guaranteed you won't have encoding problems. Docs

answered Jul 05 '18 at 05:31

Amadan

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Python json.dumps() doesn't encode emojis properly

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