title: Parsing unicode input using python json.loads
body: <p>What is the best way to load JSON Strings in Python?</p>
  
  <p>I want to use json.loads to process unicode like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import json
  json.loads(unicode_string_to_load)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I also tried supplying 'encoding' parameter with value 'utf-16', but the error did not go away.</p>
  
  <p>Full SSCCE with error:</p>
  
  <pre><code># -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  import json
  value = '{"foo" : "bar"}'
  print(json.loads(value)['foo'])     #This is correct, prints 'bar'
  
  some_unicode = unicode("degradé")  
  #last character is latin e with acute "\xe3\xa9"
  value = '{"foo" : "' + some_unicode + '"}'
  print(json.loads(value)['foo'])            #incorrect, throws error
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 
  6: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>