urllib2 and json

can anyone point out a tutorial that shows me how to do a POST request using urllib2 with the data being in JSON format?

Messa's answer only works if the server isn't bothering to check the content-type header. You'll need to specify a content-type header if you want it to really work. Here's Messa's answer modified to include a content-type header:

import json
import urllib2
data = json.dumps([1, 2, 3])
req = urllib2.Request(url, data, {'Content-Type': 'application/json'})
f = urllib2.urlopen(req)
response = f.read()
f.close()

Whatever urllib is using to figure out Content-Length seems to get confused by json, so you have to calculate that yourself.

import json
import urllib2
data = json.dumps([1, 2, 3])
clen = len(data)
req = urllib2.Request(url, data, {'Content-Type': 'application/json', 'Content-Length': clen})
f = urllib2.urlopen(req)
response = f.read()
f.close()

Took me for ever to figure this out, so I hope it helps someone else.