jsonpickle: Turning Python pickles into JSON

The other day, I saw an interesting question on StackOverflow where the author asked if there was a way to serialize a Python dictionary into a human-readable format. The answer that was given was to use a package called jsonpickle, which will serialize complex Python objects to and from JSON. This article will give you a quick overview of how to use the project.

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Getting Started

To get started properly, you will need to download and install jsonpickle. As usual, you can use pip to accomplish this task:

pip install jsonpickle

There are no dependencies for Python 2.6 or greater. For older versions of Python, you will need to install a JSON package, such as simplejson or demjson.

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Using jsonpickle

Let’s get started by creating a simple class that’s based loosely on a Car. Then we will serialize an instance of the class using jsonpickle and deserialize it.

import jsonpickle

########################################################################
class Car(object):
    """"""

    #----------------------------------------------------------------------
    def __init__(self):
        """Constructor"""
        self.wheels = 4
        self.doors = 5
        
    #----------------------------------------------------------------------
    def drive(self):
        """"""
        print "Driving the speed limit"
    
if __name__ == "__main__":
    my_car = Car()
    serialized = jsonpickle.encode(my_car)
    print serialized
    
    my_car_obj = jsonpickle.decode(serialized)
    print my_car_obj.drive()

If you run this code, you should see something like the following for output:

{"py/object": "__main__.Car", "wheels": 4, "doors": 5}
Driving the speed limit

This worked quite well. The serialized object is very easy to read when it is printed out. Reconstituting the serialized object is also very simple.

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Wrapping Up

The jsonpickle package allows the developer to choose what JSON backend they want to use for encoding and decoding the JSON via its load_backend and set_preferred_backend methods. You can also customize the serialization handlers if you want to. Overall, I believe this could be a handy project for developers that need to be able to read their serialized output easily.

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Related Reading

• jsonpickle API reference