python-rison is, not surprisingly, a Rison parser for Python. Rison is a data serialization format optimized for compactness in URIs. Rison is a slight variation of JSON that looks vastly superior after URI encoding. Rison still expresses exactly the same set of data structures as JSON, so data can be translated back and forth without loss or guesswork. See http://mjtemplate.org/examples/rison.html to learn more. Rison URLs look like this: http://example.org/example-resource?a=(key:val,key2:val2)&b=!(a,list,of,values) O-Rison and A-Rison shortcuts make these URLs cleaner still. If you know beforehand which data type an argument will receive, you can use O-Rison for objects and A-Rison for arrays, and leave off the () and !() syntax respectively: http://example.org/example-resource?a=key:val,key2:val2&b=a,list,of,values Current version may not work with unicode URLs.