The pandas library is a fantastic python toolkit to work with data. Recently I needed to read some json files in a pandas dataframe. Usually you can do that easily with the built in method:

import pandas as pd
pd.read_json('example.json')

But this method fails, if it encounters utf-8 encoded files. In contrast to the more often used methods _read_table_ and _read_csv_, _read_json_ does not provide an _encoding_ parameter. To work around this you have to import the codecs module and use the _open_ method:

import codecs
import pandas as pd
pd.read_json(codecs.open('example.json', 'r', 'utf-8'))