Serializing a Python namedtuple to json

It looks like you used to be able to subclass simplejson.JSONEncoder to make this work, but with the latest simplejson code, that is no longer the case: you have to actually modify the project code. I see no reason why simplejson should not support namedtuples, so I forked the project, added namedtuple support, and I’m currently waiting for my branch to be pulled back into the main project. If you need the fixes now, just pull from my fork.

EDIT: Looks like the latest versions of simplejson now natively support this with the namedtuple_as_object option, which defaults to True.

If it’s just one namedtuple you’re looking to serialize, using its _asdict() method will work (with Python >= 2.7)

>>> from collections import namedtuple
>>> import json
>>> FB = namedtuple("FB", ("foo", "bar"))
>>> fb = FB(123, 456)
>>> json.dumps(fb._asdict())
'{"foo": 123, "bar": 456}'

It recursively converts the namedTuple data to json.

print(m1)
## Message(id=2, agent=Agent(id=1, first_name='asd', last_name='asd', mail='[email protected]'), customer=Customer(id=1, first_name='asd', last_name='asd', mail='[email protected]', phone_number=123123), type='image', content='text', media_url='h.com', la=123123, ls=4512313)

def reqursive_to_json(obj):
    _json = {}

    if isinstance(obj, tuple):
        datas = obj._asdict()
        for data in datas:
            if isinstance(datas[data], tuple):
                _json[data] = (reqursive_to_json(datas[data]))
            else:
                 print(datas[data])
                _json[data] = (datas[data])
    return _json

data = reqursive_to_json(m1)
print(data)
{'agent': {'first_name': 'asd',
'last_name': 'asd',
'mail': '[email protected]',
'id': 1},
'content': 'text',
'customer': {'first_name': 'asd',
'last_name': 'asd',
'mail': '[email protected]',
'phone_number': 123123,
'id': 1},
'id': 2,
'la': 123123,
'ls': 4512313,
'media_url': 'h.com',
'type': 'image'}

I wrote a library for doing this: https://github.com/ltworf/typedload

It can go from and to named-tuple and back.

It supports quite complicated nested structures, with lists, sets, enums, unions, default values. It should cover most common cases.

edit: The library also supports dataclass and attr classes.

There is a more convenient solution is to use the decorator (it uses the protected field _fields).

Python 2.7+:

import json
from collections import namedtuple, OrderedDict

def json_serializable(cls):
    def as_dict(self):
        yield OrderedDict(
            (name, value) for name, value in zip(
                self._fields,
                iter(super(cls, self).__iter__())))
    cls.__iter__ = as_dict
    return cls

#Usage:

C = json_serializable(namedtuple('C', 'a b c'))
print json.dumps(C('abc', True, 3.14))

# or

@json_serializable
class D(namedtuple('D', 'a b c')):
    pass

print json.dumps(D('abc', True, 3.14))

Python 3.6.6+:

import json
from typing import TupleName

def json_serializable(cls):
    def as_dict(self):
        yield {name: value for name, value in zip(
            self._fields,
            iter(super(cls, self).__iter__()))}
    cls.__iter__ = as_dict
    return cls

# Usage:

@json_serializable
class C(NamedTuple):
    a: str
    b: bool
    c: float

print(json.dumps(C('abc', True, 3.14))

This is an old question. However:

A suggestion for all those with the same question, think carefully about using any of the private or internal features of the NamedTuple because they have before and will change again over time.

For example, if your NamedTuple is a flat value object and you’re only interested in serializing it and not in cases where it is nested into another object, you could avoid the troubles that would come up with __dict__ being removed or _as_dict() changing and just do something like (and yes this is Python 3 because this answer is for the present):

from typing import NamedTuple

class ApiListRequest(NamedTuple):
  group: str="default"
  filter: str="*"

  def to_dict(self):
    return {
      'group': self.group,
      'filter': self.filter,
    }

  def to_json(self):
    return json.dumps(self.to_dict())

I tried to use the default callable kwarg to dumps in order to do the to_dict() call if available, but that didn’t get called as the NamedTuple is convertible to a list.

The jsonplus library provides a serializer for NamedTuple instances. Use its compatibility mode to output simple objects if needed, but prefer the default as it is helpful for decoding back.

Here is my take on the problem. It serializes the NamedTuple, takes care of folded NamedTuples and Lists inside of them

def recursive_to_dict(obj: Any) -> dict:
_dict = {}

if isinstance(obj, tuple):
    node = obj._asdict()
    for item in node:
        if isinstance(node[item], list): # Process as a list
            _dict[item] = [recursive_to_dict(x) for x in (node[item])]
        elif getattr(node[item], "_asdict", False): # Process as a NamedTuple
            _dict[item] = recursive_to_dict(node[item])
        else: # Process as a regular element
            _dict[item] = (node[item])
return _dict

It’s impossible to serialize namedtuples correctly with the native python json library. It will always see tuples as lists, and it is impossible to override the default serializer to change this behaviour. It’s worse if objects are nested.

Better to use a more robust library like orjson:

import orjson
from typing import NamedTuple

class Rectangle(NamedTuple):
    width: int
    height: int

def default(obj):
    if hasattr(obj, '_asdict'):
        return obj._asdict()

rectangle = Rectangle(width=10, height=20)
print(orjson.dumps(rectangle, default=default))

=>

{
    "width":10,
    "height":20
}

simplejson.dump() instead of json.dump does the job. It may be slower though.