Nick Coghlan added the comment: json.bytes would also work for me. It wouldn't need to replicate the full main module API, just combine the text transform with UTF-8 encoding and decoding (as well as autodetected UTF-16 and UTF-32 decoding) for the main 4 functions (dump[s], load[s]). If people want UTF-16 and UTF-32 *en*coding (which seem to be rarely used in combination with JSON), then they can invoke the text transform version directly, and then do a separate encoding step. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue10976> _______________________________________