Let JSON object accept bytes or let urlopen output strings

Question

With Python 3 I am requesting a json document from a URL.

response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)

The response object is a file-like object with read and readline methods. Normally a JSON object can be created with a file opened in text mode.

obj = json.load(fp)

What I would like to do is:

obj = json.load(response)

This however does not work as urlopen returns a file object in binary mode.

A work around is of course:

str_response = response.read().decode('utf-8')
obj = json.loads(str_response)

but this feels bad...

Is there a better way that I can transform a bytes file object to a string file object? Or am I missing any parameters for either urlopen or json.load to give an encoding?

Answer 1

Python’s wonderful standard library to the rescue…

import codecs

reader = codecs.getreader("utf-8")
obj = json.load(reader(response))

Works with both py2 and py3.

Docs: Python 2, Python3