Use python -m json.tool to output Chinese UTF-8

Question

Original text file "chinese.txt" like following

{"type":"FeatureCollection","text":"你好"}

on Mac run command in Terminal like following

$ cat chinese.txt | python -m json.tool

The output is

{
    "text": "\u4f60\u597d",
    "type": "FeatureCollection"
}

How add parameter to avoid the "\u4f60\u597d" and get "你好"

What I like to do is the use python -m json.tool from the shell without modifying the code of json.tool. A common use case is to reformat a UTF-8 encoded json file, and keep the Chinese characters not like the \uxxxx.

I'm not sure I see the point of the whole command in that case? — njzk2, Jan 29 '19 at 04:09
we can use option `python -m json.tool --no-ensure-ascii`, tested on python 3.9.9 — MocXi, Dec 23 '21 at 10:11

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 04 '23 at 21:18

As of Python 3.9, json.tool has a new --no-ensure-ascii option for this.

Before 3.9, you'll need to use something else. This is (most of) the source for the 3.8 version of json.tool:

prog = 'python -m json.tool'
description = ('A simple command line interface for json module '
               'to validate and pretty-print JSON objects.')
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog=prog, description=description)
parser.add_argument('infile', nargs='?',
                    type=argparse.FileType(encoding="utf-8"),
                    help='a JSON file to be validated or pretty-printed',
                    default=sys.stdin)
parser.add_argument('outfile', nargs='?',
                    type=argparse.FileType('w', encoding="utf-8"),
                    help='write the output of infile to outfile',
                    default=sys.stdout)
parser.add_argument('--sort-keys', action='store_true', default=False,
                    help='sort the output of dictionaries alphabetically by key')
parser.add_argument('--json-lines', action='store_true', default=False,
                    help='parse input using the jsonlines format')
options = parser.parse_args()

infile = options.infile
outfile = options.outfile
sort_keys = options.sort_keys
json_lines = options.json_lines
with infile, outfile:
    try:
        if json_lines:
            objs = (json.loads(line) for line in infile)
        else:
            objs = (json.load(infile), )
        for obj in objs:
            json.dump(obj, outfile, sort_keys=sort_keys, indent=4)
            outfile.write('\n')
    except ValueError as e:
        raise SystemExit(e)

The problem is you have no way to add parameters to the call to json.dump - you'd want to do this instead:

json.dump(obj, outfile, sort_keys=sort_keys, indent=4, ensure_ascii=False)

But you'll have to write your own script for that, json.tool won't help you here.

Use python -m json.tool to output Chinese UTF-8

1 Answers1