python json dumps encoding_为什么python json.dumps抱怨ascii解码？

I have the following lines in my code

outs = codecs.getwriter('utf-8')(sys.stdout)

# dJSON contains JSON message with non-ASCII chars

outs.write(json.dumps(dJSON,encoding='utf-8', ensure_ascii=False, indent=indent_val))

I am getting the following exception:

outs.write(json.dumps(dJSON,encoding='utf-8', ensure_ascii=False, indent=indent_val))

File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 238, in dumps

**kw).encode(obj)

File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 204, in encode

return ''.join(chunks)

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 27: ordinal not in range(128)

I through that by specifying encoding='utf-8' in the json.dumps statement, I avoid this type of problem. Why a