Another option, perhaps, is to use the strict=False
argument
According to http://docs.python.org/2/library/json.html
“If strict is False (True is the default), then control characters will be allowed inside strings. Control characters in this context are those with character codes in the 0-31 range, including ‘\t’ (tab), ‘\n’, ‘\r’ and ‘\0’.”
For example:
json.loads(json_str, strict=False)