I believe json requires unicode...
As far as I can see, the library is encoding agnostic (eg ASCII, Extended ASCII and UTF-8 should all work fine - and UTF-8 is the defacto standard UNICODE encoding since the late 1990s.
As far as I can see, the library is encoding agnostic (eg ASCII, Extended ASCII and UTF-8 should all work fine - and UTF-8 is the defacto standard UNICODE encoding since the late 1990s.