Well the problem is that that string is not valid JSON syntax. It is valid Python syntax, but not JSON, for two reasons:
- JSON doesn't allow single-quote strings,
'38', only double-quote, "38".
- JSON doesn't allow a u before the string,
u"38", only bare strings which are implicitly Unicode, "38".
You need to either change the input format, or use something which can process Python strings instead.
You could use eval, which reads strings containing Python syntax, but note that this is highly dangerous if you are accepting arbitrary input, since someone can supply code to execute. Nevertheless, it works:
>>> eval(u"[u'38', u'36', u'34', u'32']")
[u'38', u'36', u'34', u'32']
Edit: khachik's answer is probably better than eval, since it won't be susceptible to evaluating arbitrary Python code, only reading Python data structures.