advanced patterns when using unicode strings with the json library in Python 2.7
I just started working with Quick question that's been bugging me - I've searched everywhere and can't find a clear answer..... I tried several approaches but none seem to work. I'm working with an scenario when trying to serialize a unicode string using the `json` library in Python 2.7. I have a simple dictionary that contains a unicode string, but when I attempt to serialize it, I receive an `UnicodeDecodeError`. Here's the code snippet that I'm working with: ```python import json data = { 'name': u'José', 'age': 30 } try: json_data = json.dumps(data) print(json_data) except UnicodeDecodeError as e: print('behavior during serialization:', e) ``` When I run this code, I get the following behavior message: ``` behavior during serialization: 'ascii' codec need to decode byte 0xe9 in position 2: ordinal not in range(128) ``` I understand that Python 2.7 has some quirks with handling unicode, but I thought that using `u''` for the string would handle the encoding properly. I've tried using `json.dumps(data, ensure_ascii=False)` to allow non-ASCII characters, but that raises the same behavior. I also checked if the default encoding is set correctly with `import sys; print(sys.getdefaultencoding())`, which returns `ascii`. How can I resolve this scenario to correctly serialize unicode strings without getting `UnicodeDecodeError`? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I'm working on a API that needs to handle this. Any ideas what could be causing this? Has anyone else encountered this? I recently upgraded to Python 3.9. Could someone point me to the right documentation? Is there a simpler solution I'm overlooking?