title: JSON load/dump in Python
body: <p>From the docs:
  <a href="http://docs.python.org/library/json.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.python.org/library/json.html</a></p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; json.loads('["foo", {"bar":["baz", null, 1.0, 2]}]')
  [u'foo', {u'bar': [u'baz', None, 1.0, 2]}]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I modified it like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; the_dump=json.dumps("['foo', {'bar':['baz', null, 1.0, 2]}]")
  &gt;&gt;&gt; the_load = json.loads(the_dump)
  u"['foo', {'bar':['baz', null, 1.0, 2]}]"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now it's a string. I want to do this: <code>the_load[1]['bar']</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Can it be done this way? Where am I going wrong?</p>
  
  <p>Why does this work?</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; a= "[1,2,3]"
  &gt;&gt;&gt; json.loads(a)[0]
  1
  </code></pre>