Serializing list to JSON

Question

I am sending information between client and Django server, and I would like to use JSON to this. I am sending simple information – list of strings. I tried using django.core.serializers, but when I did, I got

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute '_meta'

It seems this can be used only for Django objects. How can I serialize simple, Python objects?

Asked By: gruszczy

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Source

Answer 1

You can use pure Python to do it:

import json
list = [1, 2, (3, 4)] # Note that the 3rd element is a tuple (3, 4)
json.dumps(list) # '[1, 2, [3, 4]]'

Answered By: Emil Ivanov

Answer 2

If using Python 2.5, you may need to import simplejson:

try:
    import json
except ImportError:
    import simplejson as json

Answered By: reech

Answer 3

Yes, but then what do you do about the django objects? simple json tends to choke on them.

If the objects are individual model objects (not querysets, e.g.), I have occasionally stored the model object type and the pk, like so:

seralized_dict = simplejson.dumps(my_dict, 
                     default=lambda a: "[%s,%s]" % (str(type(a)), a.pk)
                     )

to de-serialize, you can reconstruct the object referenced with model.objects.get(). This doesn’t help if you are interested in the object details at the type the dict is stored, but it’s effective if all you need to know is which object was involved.

Answered By: adobelis

Serializing list to JSON

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