I see you are using requests library. From version 2.4.2 onwards, you can use json as parameter. It should have better json encoding than data.

requests.post('https://getpocket.com/v3/send', json={
    'consumer_key': consumer_key,
    'access_token': access_token,
    'actions': [{
        'item_id':'1000000000',
        'action':'archive'
     }]
})

See here for more information: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/quickstart/#more-complicated-post-requests

EDIT: If only action key should be a json string, you can try following:

import simplejson as json

requests.post('https://getpocket.com/v3/send', data={
        'consumer_key': consumer_key,
        'access_token': access_token,
        'actions': json.dumps([{
            'item_id':'1000000000',
            'action':'archive'
         }])
    })

I would recommend simplejson over json package as it is updated more frequently.

It is because you pass an request object in the json.loads

In the error it says that it needs a string or buffer instead. You can pass in the string from the request by doing:

json.loads(platformReq.text)

But platformReq.json() works the same way!

Hope that helps.

EDIT

To respond to your status code question (sorry didn't see it before). You can check the response status code like this:

if platformReq.status_code == requests.codes.ok:
    # Print the response
    print platformReq.json()
else:
    print "Something went wrong";

Take a look at the json module. More specifically the 'Decoding JSON:' section.

import json
import requests

response = requests.get()  # api call

users = json.loads(response.text)
for user in users:
    print(user['id'])

You want to pass in JSON encoded data. See the API documentation:

Remember — All post bodies must be JSON encoded data (no form data).

The requests library makes this trivially easy:

headers = {"W-Token": "Ilovemyboss"}
data = [
    {
        'url': '/rest/shifts',
        'params': {'user_id': 0, 'other_stuff': 'value'},
        'method': 'post',
    },
    {
        'url': '/rest/shifts',
        'params': {'user_id': 1,'other_stuff': 'value'},
        'method':'post',
    },
]
requests.post(url, json=data, headers=headers)

By using the json keyword argument the data is encoded to JSON for you, and the Content-Type header is set to application/json.

You're looping over the full JSON response keys, not the actual users list, then i would be each user object, so use that rather than the response again

Try

for i in users.get('user', []):
    ... 
    user_details['id'] = i['userid']
    user_details['email'] = i['email']

You can also build that list in one line

user_list = [ {"id":u["userid"], "email":u["email"]} for u in users.get('user', []) ]
print(user_list)