Trying to encode a a dict object into json using Python 2.7's json (ie: import json).

The object has some byte strings in it that are "pickled" data using cPickle, so for json's purposes, they are basically random byte strings. I was using django.utils's simplejson and this worked fine. But I recently switched to Python 2.7 on google app engine and they don't seem to have simplejson available anymore.

Now that I am using json, it throws an exception when it encounters bytes that aren't part of UTF-8. The error that I'm getting is:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 0: invalid start byte

It would be nice if it printed out a string of the character codes like the debugging might do, ie: \u0002]q\u0000U\u001201. But I really don't much care how it handles this data just as long as it doesn't throw an exception and continues serializing the information that it does recognize.

How can I make this happen?

Thanks!