simplejson is a simple, fast, complete, correct and extensible JSON encoder and decoder. . The encoder may be subclassed to provide serialization in any kind of situation, without any special support by the objects to be serialized (somewhat like pickle). . The decoder can handle incoming JSON strings of any specified encoding (UTF-8 by default). . simplejson is the externally maintained development version of the json library included with Python 2.6 and Python 3.0, but maintains backwards compatibility with Python 2.5.