Just decode the JSON as JSON, and then write out a new JSON document without ensuring the data is ASCII safe:

import json

with open("input.json", "r", encoding="utf-8") as input:
    with open("output.txt", "w", encoding="utf-8") as output:
        document = json.load(input)
        json.dump(document, output, ensure_ascii=False)

From the json.dump() documentation:

If ensure_ascii is true (the default), the output is guaranteed to have all incoming non-ASCII characters escaped. If ensure_ascii is false, these characters will be output as-is.

Demo:

>>> import json
>>> print(json.loads(r'"l\u00f6yt\u00e4\u00e4"'))
löytää
>>> print(json.dumps(json.loads(r'"l\u00f6yt\u00e4\u00e4"')))
"l\u00f6yt\u00e4\u00e4"
>>> print(json.dumps(json.loads(r'"l\u00f6yt\u00e4\u00e4"'), ensure_ascii=False))
"löytää"

If you have extremely large documents, you could still process them textually, line by line, but use regular expressions to do the replacements:

import re

unicode_escape = re.compile(
    r'(?<!\\)'
    r'(?:\\u([dD][89abAB][a-fA-F0-9]{2})\\u([dD][c-fC-F][a-fA-F0-9]{2})'
    r'|\\u([a-fA-F0-9]{4}))')
def replace(m):
    return bytes.fromhex(''.join(m.groups(''))).decode('utf-16-be')

with open("input.json", "r", encoding="utf-8") as input:
    with open("output.txt", "w", encoding="utf-8") as output:
        for line in input:
            output.write(unicode_escape.sub(replace, line))

This however fails if your JSON has embedded JSON documents in strings or if the escape sequence is preceded by an escaped backslash.

It is not valid JSON string - JSON supports only 4 hex digits after \u. Results from both PHP and JS are correct.

It is not possible decode this using standard functions.

Where did you get this JSON string?

About correct json for string you want to get - it should be "\u2514\u2500\u2500 mystring", or just "└── mystring" (json supports any unicode characters in strings except " and \).

Also if you need to encode some character that require more than two bytes - it will result in two escape codes for example "𩄎" would be "\ud864\udd0e" when escaped.

So, If you really need to decode string above - you can fix it before decoding, replacing \uffffffe2 by \uffff\uffe2 via regexp (for js it would be something like: s.replace(/(\\u[A-Fa-f0-9]{4})([A-Fa-f0-9]{4})/gi,'$1\\u$2') ).

But anyway character codes in string specified above does not look right.

While there are some good answers here, I ended up using PyYAML to parse my JSON files, since it gives the keys and values as str type strings instead of the unicode type. Because JSON is a subset of YAML, it works nicely:

>>> import json
>>> import yaml
>>> list_org = ['a', 'b']
>>> list_dump = json.dumps(list_org)
>>> list_dump
'["a", "b"]'
>>> json.loads(list_dump)
[u'a', u'b']
>>> yaml.safe_load(list_dump)
['a', 'b']

Notes

Some things to note though:

• I get string objects because all my entries are ASCII encoded. If I would use Unicode encoded entries, I would get them back as unicode objects — there is no conversion!

• You should (probably always) use PyYAML's safe_load function; if you use it to load JSON files, you don't need the "additional power" of the load function anyway.

• If you want a YAML parser that has more support for the 1.2 version of the spec (and correctly parses very low numbers) try Ruamel YAML: pip install ruamel.yaml and import ruamel.yaml as yaml was all I needed in my tests.

Conversion

As stated, there isn't any conversion! If you can't be sure to only deal with ASCII values (and you can't be sure most of the time), better use a conversion function:

I used the one from Mark Amery a couple of times now, it works great and is very easy to use. You can also use a similar function as an object_hook instead, as it might gain you a performance boost on big files. See the slightly more involved answer from Mirec Miskuf for that.

This is not a bug in either implementation. There is no requirement to escape U+00B0. To quote the RFC:

2.5. Strings

The representation of strings is similar to conventions used in the C family of programming languages. A string begins and ends with quotation marks. All Unicode characters may be placed within the quotation marks except for the characters that must be escaped: quotation mark, reverse solidus, and the control characters (U+0000 through U+001F).

Any character may be escaped.

Escaping everything inflates the size of the data (all code points can be represented in four or fewer bytes in all Unicode transformation formats; whereas encoding them all makes them six or twelve bytes).

It is more likely that you have a text transcoding bug somewhere in your code and escaping everything in the ASCII subset masks the problem. It is a requirement of the JSON spec that all data use a Unicode encoding.

According to the PHP documentation on stripslashes (), it

un-quotes a quoted string.

Which means, that it basically removes all backslashes, which are used for escaping characters (or Unicode sequences). When removing those, you basically have no chance to be completely sure that any sequence as "u0024" was meant to be a Unicode entity, your user could just have entered that.

Besides that, you will get some trouble when using stripslashes () on a JSON value that contains escaped quotes. Consider this example:

{
  "key": "\"value\""
}

This will become invalid when using stripslashes () because it will then look like this:

{
  "key": ""value""
}

Which is not parseable as it isn't a valid JSON object. When you don't use stripslashes (), all escape sequences will be converted by the JSON parser and before outputting the (decoded) JSON object to the client, PHP will automatically decode (or "convert") the Unicode sequences your data may contain.

Conclusion: I'd suggest not to use stripslashes () when dealing with JSON entities as it may break things (as seen in the previous example, but also in your problem).

Instead of sending نوروز in URL use URLEncoder for encoding it before appending it in main URL:

String strSearchQuery= URLEncoder.encode(rawQuery, "utf-8");
String first_url="http://www.aparat.com/etc/api/videoBySearch/text/"
                                                        +strSearchQuery;

This snippet will helps you to preserve the data without unicode prefix notation u :

>>> import json
>>> c = {u'xyz': {u'key1': u'Value1',u'key2': u'Value2'}}
>>> print c
{u'xyz': {u'key2': u'Value2', u'key1': u'Value1'}}
>>> d = eval(json.dumps(c))
>>> print d
{'xyz': {'key2': 'Value2', 'key1': 'Value1'}}

json.dumps() will convert the dict to string type and eval() will reverse it.

Note: key1 value has changed from None to 'value1' for testing purpose