Parses a textfile using json to build a python object representation

def json_decode_file(filename):
    """
    Parses a textfile using json to build a python object representation
    """
    seq = open(filename).read()
    # The JSON standard has no comments syntax. We have to remove them
    # before feeding python's JSON parser
    seq = json_remove_comments(seq)
    # Parse all the unicode stuff to utf-8
    return json_unicode_to_utf8(json.loads(seq))