Serializing a user-defined class

T.J. Simmons theimmortalbum at gmail.com
Wed Nov 3 11:30:00 EDT 2010


Hi all, got a question regarding serializing classes that I've defined. I
have some classes like

class Foo:
     def __init__(self, x, y):
          self.x = x, self.y = y

then a class that can contain multiple Foos, such as:

class Bar:
     def __init__(self):
          self.foos = [Foo(a, b), Foo(1, 2)]


While that's a gross oversimplification of the real structure (it gets much,
much more nested than that), that's a pretty decent overview. The actual
data for this is coming from a pseudo-XML file without any actual structure,
so I wrote a parser according to the spec given to me, so I now have all the
data in a series of classes I've defined, with actual structure.

What I'm wanting to do is take this data I have and spit it out into JSON,
but I really don't see a good way (I'm new to Python, this is my first real
project with it).

I've defined a method in Foo, such as:

def toDict(self):
     return dict(x = self.x, y = self.y)

but that obviously isn't going to work out like I hope when I try to
serialize Bar, with the multiple Foos.

Does anyone have a great way of doing this? This has been a pretty much
non-stop learning/codefest the past few days and I'm out of ideas for this,
which is the last part of the project.

Let me know if I can clarify in any way.

Thanks,
T.J.
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