Saving a JSON with accents, umlauts, and other encoded characters

Scripting
1

Hi All,

This is a solution to a problem I solved while preparing a post for this forum. Just thought I’d share the ‘riches’.

I was having trouble saving a JSON file that contains non-ASCII characters.

I got material data from okobaudat database API using the Swiftlet plugin (which is great, btw) . I got strings that contained non-ASCII characters and viewed them in the GH canvas perfectly fine.

(Data from swiftlet is internalized):

image
image1675×565 47.8 KB

Printing in the GHPython Editor also appears as desired, and printing through repr() shows the encoding… but which encoding???

image
image1586×824 85.3 KB

A little guess and check showed that the characters before and after encoding matched when I used ‘Latin1’.

`print SwiftletString[0:256]

print '_________________________________'

print repr(SwiftletString[0:256])
print '_________________________________'

convertedString = SwiftletString.encode('Latin1', 'replace')

print convertedString[0:256]
print '_________________________________'
print repr(convertedString[0:256])`

Here’s what prints from those statements:

image
image1281×662 39.1 KB

The second to last step was to convert the string to a dictionary using the ‘Latin1’ encoding (this was a necessary step for me, because I wanted to retrieve data from the JSON file okobaudat provides using ghpython)

 convertedDictionary = json.loads(convertedString, encoding='Latin1'

… and then finally write that dictionary out to a JSON file.

        filePath = PathToWriteJSON + ".json"
        JSONOut = open(filePath, "wb")
        json.dump(convertedDictionary, JSONOut, encoding='Latin1', ensure_ascii=False)
        JSONOut.close()
        OutputPath = filePath
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