Can I get JSON to load into an OrderedDict?

Ok so I can use an OrderedDict in json.dump. That is, an OrderedDict can be used as an input to JSON.

But can it be used as an output? If so how? In my case I'd like to load into an OrderedDict so I can keep the order of the keys in the file.

If not, is there some kind of workaround?

Yes, you can. By specifying the object_pairs_hook argument to JSONDecoder. In fact, this is the exact example given in the documentation.

>>> json.JSONDecoder(object_pairs_hook=collections.OrderedDict).decode('{"foo":1, "bar": 2}')
OrderedDict([('foo', 1), ('bar', 2)])
>>> 

You can pass this parameter to json.loads (if you don't need a Decoder instance for other purposes) like so:

>>> import json
>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> data = json.loads('{"foo":1, "bar": 2}', object_pairs_hook=OrderedDict)
>>> print json.dumps(data, indent=4)
{
    "foo": 1,
    "bar": 2
}
>>> 

Using json.load is done in the same way:

>>> data = json.load(open('config.json'), object_pairs_hook=OrderedDict)

Simple version for Python 2.7+

my_ordered_dict = json.loads(json_str, object_pairs_hook=collections.OrderedDict)

Or for Python 2.4 to 2.6

import simplejson as json
import ordereddict

my_ordered_dict = json.loads(json_str, object_pairs_hook=ordereddict.OrderedDict)