JSON Serialization
Learn about the JSON object serialization in Python.
We'll cover the following
The JSON format can serialize a number of commonly used Python object classes, including:
- None
- Boolean
- Float and integer
- String
- Lists of compatible objects
- Dictionaries with string keys and compatible objects as values
The compatible objects can include nested structures. This dictionary-within-list and dictionary-within-dictionary recursion can allow JSON to represent very complex things.
We might consider a theoretical (but invalid) type hint like the following:
JSON = Union[None, bool, int, float, str, List['JSON'], Dict[str, 'JSON']]
This hint isn’t directly supported by mypy, because it involves explicit recursion: the JSON type is defined based on the JSON type. This hint can be a helpful conceptual framework for understanding what we can represent in JSON notation. As a practical matter, we often use Dict[str, Any]
to describe JSON objects, ignoring
the details of other structures that might be present. We can be a little more specific, though, when we know the expected keys for the dictionary; we’ll expand on this below.
In JSON notation, our data will look like this:
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