You have an HJSON document , after which you can use the hjson project to hjson it:
>>> import hjson >>> hjson.loads('{javascript_style:"Look ma, no quotes!"}') OrderedDict([('javascript_style', 'Look ma, no quotes!')])
HJSON is JSON without the requirement to quote object names, and even for certain string values, with added support for comments and multi-line strings, as well as simplified rules in which commas should be used (including not using commas at all).
Or you can install and use the demjson library ; it supports parsing valid JavaScript (missing quotes):
import demjson result = demjson.decode(jsonp_payload)
Only when you set the strict=True flag demjson refuse to parse your input:
>>> import demjson >>> demjson.decode('{javascript_style:"Look ma, no quotes!"}') {u'javascript_style': u'Look ma, no quotes!'} >>> demjson.decode('{javascript_style:"Look ma, no quotes!"}', strict=True) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/Users/mjpieters/Development/venvs/stackoverflow-2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/demjson.py", line 5701, in decode return_stats=(return_stats or write_stats) ) File "/Users/mjpieters/Development/venvs/stackoverflow-2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/demjson.py", line 4917, in decode raise errors[0] demjson.JSONDecodeError: ('JSON does not allow identifiers to be used as strings', u'javascript_style')
Using a regular expression, you can try to find the correct JSON; however, this can lead to false positives. The template will be:
import re valid_json = re.sub(r'(?<={|,)([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*)(?=:)', r'"\1"', jsonp_payload)
This matches { or followed by a JavaScript identifier (a character followed by additional characters or numbers) and immediately after it : colon. If your specified values contain any such patterns, you will receive invalid JSON.