Safely parsing nested json double quotes - json

Question

The issue:
>>> import json
>>> json_str='{"message": "John said "come here!""}'
>>> json.loads(json_str)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/Users/ram/.pyenv/versions/3.9.6/lib/python3.9/json/__init__.py", line 346, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "/Users/ram/.pyenv/versions/3.9.6/lib/python3.9/json/decoder.py", line 337, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
File "/Users/ram/.pyenv/versions/3.9.6/lib/python3.9/json/decoder.py", line 353, in raw_decode
obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx)
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting ',' delimiter: line 1 column 25 (char 24)
Then I attempted to escape the double-quotes. Like so:
>>> json_str='{"message": "John said \"come here!\""}'
>>> json.loads(json_str)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/Users/ram/.pyenv/versions/3.9.6/lib/python3.9/json/__init__.py", line 346, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "/Users/ram/.pyenv/versions/3.9.6/lib/python3.9/json/decoder.py", line 337, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
File "/Users/ram/.pyenv/versions/3.9.6/lib/python3.9/json/decoder.py", line 353, in raw_decode
obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx)
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting ',' delimiter: line 1 column 25 (char 24)
The following works though:
>>> json_str='{"message": "John said \'come here!\'"}'
>>> json.loads(json_str)
{'message': "John said 'come here!'"}
What am I doing wrong? Is it possible to flag the json library to be more forgiving (helps me leave json parsing to the json library)?
PS: Following the answer here, I attempted the following:
>>> data=json.dumps('{"message":"John said "hello!""}')
>>> print(data)
"{\"message\":\"John said \"hello!\"\"}"
>>> dict = json.loads(data)
>>> print(dict)
{"message":"John said "hello!""}
>>> print(dict['message'])
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: string indices must be integers
>>> print(dict[0])
{
The last json.loads is returning a string instead of dict. But the correctly escaped quotes in data did sound promising.

Answer 1

You can simply use either a raw string or double backslashes so that you both escape the backslashes in python as well as in the json string so that json.loads can see the backslashes.
>>> json.loads(r'{"message": "John said \"come here!\""}')
{'message': 'John said "come here!"'}
>>> json.loads('{"message": "John said \\"come here!\\""}')
{'message': 'John said "come here!"'}