Bulletproof json.dump?

[Adam Funk]

On 2020-07-06, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 10:11 PM Jon Ribbens via Python-list
><python-list at python.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 2020-07-06, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 8:36 PM Adam Funk <a24061 at ducksburg.com> wrote:
>> >> Is there a "bulletproof" version of json.dump somewhere that will
>> >> convert bytes to str, any other iterables to list, etc., so you can
>> >> just get your data into a file & keep working?
>> >
>> > That's the PHP definition of "bulletproof" - whatever happens, no
>> > matter how bad, just keep right on going.
>>
>> While I agree entirely with your point, there is however perhaps room
>> for a bit more helpfulness from the json module. There is no sensible
>> reason I can think of that it refuses to serialize sets, for example.
>
> Sets don't exist in JSON. I think that's a sensible reason.

I don't agree.  Tuples & lists don't exist separately in JSON, but
both are serializable (to the same thing).  Non-string keys aren't
allowed in JSON, but it silently converts numbers to strings instead
of barfing.  Typically, I've been using sets to deduplicate values as
I go along, & having to walk through the whole object changing them to
lists before serialization strikes me as the kind of pointless labor
that I expect when I'm using Java.  ;-)



>> Going a bit further and, for example, automatically calling isoformat()
>> on date/time/datetime objects would perhaps be a bit more controversial,
>> but would frequently be useful, and there's no obvious downside that
>> occurs to me.
>
> They wouldn't round-trip without some way of knowing which strings
> represent date/times. If you just want a one-way output format, it's
> not too hard to subclass the encoder - there's an example right there
> in the docs (showing how to create a representation for complex
> numbers). The vanilla JSON encoder shouldn't do any of this. In fact,
> just supporting infinities and nans is fairly controversial - see
> other threads happening right now.
>
> Maybe what people want is a pretty printer instead?
>
> https://docs.python.org/3/library/pprint.html
>
> Resilient against recursive data structures, able to emit Python-like
> code for many formats, is as readable as JSON, and is often
> round-trippable. It lacks JSON's interoperability, but if you're
> trying to serialize sets and datetimes, you're forfeiting that anyway.
>
> ChrisA


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