I appreciate the answers the community has provided, I think I need to add some additional context.
I use a trick to let me pass the information into my browser client application. The browser requests the server information from a form whose target is a hidden iframe. The string the server serializes is wrapped in html that embeds it in an onload handler like this: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd";> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /><script type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[ function vpage_load() { var aParent = window.parent; if (!aParent || !aParent.document || !aParent.document.vpage) { alert("No parent, parent.document, or parent.document.vpage"); return;} var aSerializedObject = '%(jsonString)s'; if (aParent && aParent._clientApplication) { aParent._clientApplication.loadObject(aSerializedObject, window.document, '' + window.document.location, true)} else { alert("No parent or no clientApplication")} } //]]></script> </head> <body onload="vpage_load();"> <input id="state" value="" type="text"> <textarea id="vpage"></textarea> </body></html> When this html finishes loading, its onload handler fires, it in turn fires the "loadObject" method of the _clientApplication that is waiting for the result, and the clientApplication then unpacks aSerializedObject into the browser. Once back in the browser, the loadObject method calls JSON.parse on aSerializedObject, the json string we're discussing. A serialized object typically contains many (at least tens, and sometimes several hundred) html fragments. It contains at most a handful of apostrophes. That means there are MANY more double quotes than apostrophes, if I delimit attributes with double quotes. In order to successfully pass the escapes to the server, I already have to double any each backslash. At the end of the day, it's easier -- and results in better performance -- to convert each apostrophe to its unicode equivalent, as I originally asked. I just want to know if there's a faster way to persuade simplejson to accomplish the feat. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
