How to get string objects instead of Unicode from JSON?

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I’m using Python 2 to parse JSON from ASCII encoded text files.

When loading these files with either json or simplejson, all my string values are cast to Unicode objects instead of string objects. The problem is, I have to use the data with some libraries that only accept string objects. I can’t change the libraries nor update them.

Is it possible to get string objects instead of Unicode ones?

Example

>>> import json
>>> original_list = ['a', 'b']
>>> json_list = json.dumps(original_list)
>>> json_list
'["a", "b"]'
>>> new_list = json.loads(json_list)
>>> new_list
[u'a', u'b']  # I want these to be of type `str`, not `unicode`

Update

This question was asked a long time ago, when I was stuck with Python 2. One easy and clean solution for today is to use a recent version of Python — i.e. Python 3 and forward.

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