Myujth

I need to send some data to a server that I do not own or operate. The data must be sent in a form parameter via HTTP POST. The key must be "logs" and the value must be a JSON array. Each element of this array is a CSV string, delimited by the unicode representation of Ctrl-A, u0001 (not the literal char).

When I convert my array of CSV strings to a JSON array, via json.dumps, it implicitly escapes some characters (such as ").

Problem: json.dumps also implicitly escapes my CSV delimiter u0001, changing it to \u0001, which causes the server to reject my data. To work-around this, I manually "un"-escape it: s.replace('\\u0001', '\u0001')

Question: Are there any potential repercussions to using this hacky workaround? Is there a more elegant way for me to handle this problem?

# Ctrl-A (u0001) delimited CSV strings
logs = ['VAL1\u0001"key":"VAL2"', 'VAL1\u0001"key":"VAL2"'] 

# Serialize as JSON (it implicitly escapes chars, including Ctrl-A)
serialized_logs = json.dumps(logs)

# replace '\u0001' with 'u0001' (unescape it)
# this seems HACKY -- is there a better way to handle this?
serialized_logs = serialized_logs.replace('\\u0001', '\u0001')

# send over HTTP
params = 'logs' : serialized_logs 
response = requests.post(url, data=params)

Note: python 2.7

just use unicode strings in your list and dont escape the unicode

logs2 = [u'VAL1u0001"key":"VAL2"', u'VAL1u0001"key":"VAL2"'] 
serialized_logs2 = json.dumps(logs2)

should do the right thing you can verify it by

print(serialized_logs2 == serialized_logs.replace("\\u0001","\u0001"))

(where serialized_logs is your json.dumps result above)

see: https://repl.it/@JoranBeasley/SoreGrimQuotient (python2)