Can I get JSON to load into an OrderedDict?

Simple version for Python 2.7+

my_ordered_dict = json.loads(json_str, object_pairs_hook=collections.OrderedDict)

Or for Python 2.4 to 2.6

import simplejson as json
import ordereddict

my_ordered_dict = json.loads(json_str, object_pairs_hook=ordereddict.OrderedDict)

Yes, you can. By specifying the object_pairs_hook argument to JSONDecoder. In fact, this is the exact example given in the documentation.

>>> json.JSONDecoder(object_pairs_hook=collections.OrderedDict).decode('{"foo":1, "bar": 2}')
OrderedDict([('foo', 1), ('bar', 2)])
>>> 

You can pass this parameter to json.loads (if you don't need a Decoder instance for other purposes) like so:

>>> import json
>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> data = json.loads('{"foo":1, "bar": 2}', object_pairs_hook=OrderedDict)
>>> print json.dumps(data, indent=4)
{
    "foo": 1,
    "bar": 2
}
>>> 

Using json.load is done in the same way:

>>> data = json.load(open('config.json'), object_pairs_hook=OrderedDict)

Some great news! Since version 3.6 the cPython implementation has preserved the insertion order of dictionaries (https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-September/146327.html). This means that the json library is now order preserving by default. Observe the difference in behaviour between python 3.5 and 3.6. The code:

import json
data = json.loads('{"foo":1, "bar":2, "fiddle":{"bar":2, "foo":1}}')
print(json.dumps(data, indent=4))

In py3.5 the resulting order is undefined:

{
    "fiddle": {
        "bar": 2,
        "foo": 1
    },
    "bar": 2,
    "foo": 1
}

In the cPython implementation of python 3.6:

{
    "foo": 1,
    "bar": 2,
    "fiddle": {
        "bar": 2,
        "foo": 1
    }
}

The really great news is that this has become a language specification as of python 3.7 (as opposed to an implementation detail of cPython 3.6+): https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2017-December/151283.html

So the answer to your question now becomes: upgrade to python 3.6! :)