mathspp/extendedjson

Easily extend JSON to encode and decode arbitrary Python objects.

extendedjson

Easily extend JSON to encode and decode arbitrary Python objects.

Getting started

You can get extendedjson from PyPI, which means it's easily installable with pip:

python -m pip install extendedjson

Example usage

Suppose you want to extend the JSON format to handle complex numbers, which corresponds to the type complex in Python.

To do that, you need to:

1. Determine how a complex number could look like as a JSON dictionary. For example, a dictionary with keys "real" and "imag" is enough to determine what complex number we are talking about.
2. Subclass ExtendedEncoder and implement the method encode_complex that accepts a complex number and returns a dictionary with the format you defined.
3. Subclass ExtendedDecoder and implement a method decode_complex that accepts a dictionary with the format you described and returns an instance of a complex number.

Here is the code:

import extendedjson as xjson


class MyEncoder(xjson.ExtendedEncoder):
    def encode_complex(self, c):
        return {"real": c.real, "imag": c.imag}


class MyDecoder(xjson.ExtendedDecoder):
    def decode_complex(self, dict_):
        return complex(dict_["real"], dict_["imag"])

Then, you can use your classes with the standard module json, by specifying the cls keyword argument in the functions json.load, json.loads, json.dump, and json.dumps:

import json

c = complex(1, 2)
c_json = json.dumps(c, cls=MyEncoder)
c_ = json.loads(c_json, cls=MyDecoder)
print(c_)  # (1+2j)
print(c_ == c)  # True

Refer to this article to learn more about the internal details of extendedjson.

Changelog

Refer to the CHANGELOG.md file.