simplejson 1.7dev-r1000

JSONEncoder

Extensible JSON <http://json.org> encoder for Python data structures.

Supports the following objects and types by default:

Python JSON
dict object
list, tuple array
str, unicode string
int, long, float number
True true
False false
None null

To extend this to recognize other objects, subclass and implement a .default() method with another method that returns a serializable object for o if possible, otherwise it should call the superclass implementation (to raise TypeError).


Methods

f __init__(self, skipkeys=False, ensure_ascii=True, check_circular=True, allow_nan=True, sort_keys=False, indent=None, separators=None, encoding='utf-8') ...

Constructor for JSONEncoder, with sensible defaults.

If skipkeys is False, then it is a TypeError to attempt encoding of keys that are not str, int, long, float or None. If skipkeys is True, such items are simply skipped.

If ensure_ascii is True, the output is guaranteed to be str objects with all incoming unicode characters escaped. If ensure_ascii is false, the output will be unicode object.

If check_circular is True, then lists, dicts, and custom encoded objects will be checked for circular references during encoding to prevent an infinite recursion (which would cause an OverflowError). Otherwise, no such check takes place.

If allow_nan is True, then NaN, Infinity, and -Infinity will be encoded as such. This behavior is not JSON specification compliant, but is consistent with most JavaScript based encoders and decoders. Otherwise, it will be a ValueError to encode such floats.

If sort_keys is True, then the output of dictionaries will be sorted by key; this is useful for regression tests to ensure that JSON serializations can be compared on a day-to-day basis.

If indent is a non-negative integer, then JSON array elements and object members will be pretty-printed with that indent level. An indent level of 0 will only insert newlines. None is the most compact representation.

If specified, separators should be a (item_separator, key_separator) tuple. The default is (', ', ': '). To get the most compact JSON representation you should specify (',', ':') to eliminate whitespace.

If encoding is not None, then all input strings will be transformed into unicode using that encoding prior to JSON-encoding. The default is UTF-8.

f default(self, o) ...

Implement this method in a subclass such that it returns a serializable object for o, or calls the base implementation (to raise a TypeError).

For example, to support arbitrary iterators, you could implement default like this:

def default(self, o):
    try:
        iterable = iter(o)
    except TypeError:
        pass
    else:
        return list(iterable)
    return JSONEncoder.default(self, o)

f encode(self, o) ...

Return a JSON string representation of a Python data structure.

>>> JSONEncoder().encode({"foo": ["bar", "baz"]})
'{"foo":["bar", "baz"]}'

f iterencode(self, o) ...

Encode the given object and yield each string representation as available.

For example:

for chunk in JSONEncoder().iterencode(bigobject):
    mysocket.write(chunk)

See the source for more information.