The difference is that json.dumps applies some minor pretty-printing by default but JSON.stringify does not.

To remove all whitespace, like JSON.stringify, you need to specify the separators.

json_mylist = json.dumps(mylist, separators=(',', ':'))

I don't really understand what you're asking. You don't want 'false' as a string, that's not how it's done in JSON. The inverse of json.loads() is json.dumps() and it handles all the necessary mapping between Python types and JS types.

>>> import json
>>> foo = {1: True}
>>> json.dumps(foo)
'{"1": true}'

The equivalent to Python's json.dumps() in JavaScript is JSON.stringify() as in:

var jsonstr = JSON.stringify(someVariable);

Valid JSON doesn't contain structures like u'something', only "something". If you really have a string like that, it's likely from Python via repr() or similar.

If you're trying to convert Python objects to JavaScript objects from within their respective environments, in Python you would convert them to a JSON encoded strings using json.dumps(), transfer the strings to the JavaScript environment, and then use JSON.parse() to convert them back into objects.

(Keep in mind that JSON doesn't understand anything beyond some basic types such as string, float, boolean, array, and key:value structures. For example, trying to transfer a Python datetime object is likely to get you string or a collection key:value pairs rather than an actual JavaScript Date object.)

json.dumps() is much more than just making a string out of a Python object, it would always produce a valid JSON string (assuming everything inside the object is serializable) following the Type Conversion Table.

For instance, if one of the values is None, the str() would produce an invalid JSON which cannot be loaded:

>>> data = {'jsonKey': None}
>>> str(data)
"{'jsonKey': None}"
>>> json.loads(str(data))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 338, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 366, in decode
    obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 382, in raw_decode
    obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx)
ValueError: Expecting property name: line 1 column 2 (char 1)

But the dumps() would convert None into null making a valid JSON string that can be loaded:

>>> import json
>>> data = {'jsonKey': None}
>>> json.dumps(data)
'{"jsonKey": null}'
>>> json.loads(json.dumps(data))
{u'jsonKey': None}

So I guess you are using Django Rest framework.

request.data

Will in Django Rest provide you with a parsed version of the request body. Because you are using the content-type: json it will try and parse it as .. json.

See docs here: https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/requests/#data

In regular Django for parsing a JSON request it would require the use of json.loads like:

parsed_json = json.loads(request.body)

Python has a built-in JSON parsing library. Adding import json provides basic JSON parsing functionality, which can be used as follows:

import json
personString = "{'{id:'E1',firstname:'Peter',... " # This would contain your JSON string
person = json.loads( personString ) # This will parse the string into a native Python dictionary, be sure to add some error handling should a parsing error occur

person['firstname'] # Yields 'Peter'
person['activities'] # Yields a list with the activities.

More information here: http://docs.python.org/2/library/json.html