import urllib, json
response = urllib.urlopen("http://reddit.com/.json")
content = response.read()
data = json.loads(content)

import urllib.request, json
response = urllib.request.urlopen("http://reddit.com/.json")
content = response.read()
data = json.loads(content)

import urllib.request, json
response = urllib.request.urlopen("http://reddit.com/.json")
content = response.read()
data = json.loads(content.decode("utf8"))

>>> response.headers['content-type']
'application/json; charset=UTF-8'