from __future__ import *

simplejson (documentation) is a simple, fast, complete, correct and extensible JSON (RFC 4627) encoder/decoder for Python 2.3+. It is pure Python code with no dependencies, but features an optional C extension for speed-ups.

simplejson 2.0.1 is a minor update:

• Fixes long encoding regression introduced in 2.0.0
• Fixes MinGW build regression introduced in 2.0.0

I didn't manage to do a simplejson 2.0.0 release notice here but that was a MAJOR update!

• optimized Python encoding path
• optimized Python decoding path
• optimized C encoding path
• optimized C decoding path
• switched to sphinx docs (nearly the same as the json module in python 2.6)

Even without the C speedups, it's several times faster. With the C speedups, it's WAY faster. I highly recommend that everyone update their frameworks to use the latest code.

For the primary benchmark I was concerned with (some internal data structures that Mochi uses) encoding is about 4x faster than cPickle (!), and decoding is just a tiny bit slower.

There's little excuse to use other libraries now. The fastest alternative I'm aware of is cjson 1.0.5, which is currently a little faster than simplejson 2.0.0 when decoding but is actually slower than simplejson 2.0.0 at encoding (the more important path for people vending web services). In both cases, simplejson provides more flexibility (e.g. the decoding object_hook), so a slight speed cost when decoding is probably to be expected.

There aren't really any API breaking changes, but when decoding a str input it will return str objects instead of unicode if the str is all ASCII with no escaped characters. I'm not aware of any scenario other than doctests where this could be a problem.