How to use Django’s assertJSONEqual to verify response of view returning JsonResponse

It looks like you’re working with Python 3 so you’ll need to turn response.content into a UTF-8 encoded string before passing it to self.assertJSONEqual:

class AddItemToCollectionTest(TestCase):

    def test_success_when_not_added_before(self):
        response = self.client.post('/add-item-to-collection')
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)
        self.assertJSONEqual(
            str(response.content, encoding='utf8'),
            {'status': 'success'}
        )

If you want to simultaneously support both Python 2.7 and Python 3, use the six compatibility library that django ships with:

from __future__ import unicode_literals
from django.utils import six

class AddItemToCollectionTest(TestCase):

    def test_success_when_not_added_before(self):
        response = self.client.post('/add-item-to-collection')
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)

        response_content = response.content
        if six.PY3:
            response_content = str(response_content, encoding='utf8')

        self.assertJSONEqual(
            response_content,
            {'status': 'success'}
        )