simplejson is a simple, fast, complete, correct and extensible JSON <http://json.org> encoder and decoder for Python 2.5+ and Python 3.3+. It is pure Python code with no dependencies, but includes an optional C extension for a serious speed boost.

The latest documentation for simplejson can be read online here: http://simplejson.readthedocs.org/

simplejson is the externally maintained development version of the json library included with Python 2.6 and Python 3.0, but maintains backwards compatibility with Python 2.5.

The encoder can be specialized to provide serialization in any kind of situation, without any special support by the objects to be serialized (somewhat like pickle). This is best done with the default kwarg to dumps.

The decoder can handle incoming JSON strings of any specified encoding (UTF-8 by default). It can also be specialized to post-process JSON objects with the object_hook or object_pairs_hook kwargs. This is particularly useful for implementing protocols such as JSON-RPC that have a richer type system than JSON itself.

For those of you that have legacy systems to maintain, there is a very old fork of simplejson in the python2.2 branch that supports Python 2.2. This is based off of a very old version of simplejson, is not maintained, and should only be used as a last resort.