bytes to json

[GrahamL]

Hi
I am trying to send json data over a pipe but cannot get it quite right
Send

mesages = [{"id": "1", "txt": "message 1", "start_date": "2014-02-09", "start_time": "16:20", "duration": "01:00"}]
        win32file.WriteFile(handle,     str.encode(json.dumps(mesages), encoding="ascii"))

receive

 result, data = win32file.ReadFile(p, 65535)
            json_data = json.dumps(data.decode('ascii'))
            print(json_data['first_name'])

This gives me this error
[error
TypeError: string indices must be integers
[/error]

What is the correct way of doing this?