[python] How do I request and process JSON with python?

I am trying to send a GET request to a URL that I know returns data in the form of JSON using python.

I would like to know how to send this request to http://someurl/path/to/json, and how to parse it - preferably to a python dict.

Python's standard library has json and urllib2 modules.

import json
import urllib2

data = json.load(urllib2.urlopen('http://someurl/path/to/json'))