Kiwi JSON

Purpose

At the time of creating this lib, there were (at least) three implementation of default_encoder() copy-pasted from one place, evolving its own way and about to being copy-pasted further. If you have read the story about AI and paperclips, you have an idea where this would lead us to.

To prevent this from happening, this library should unify all the implementation, and provide reusable implementation of the JSON encoding.

Installation

Add kiwi-json into your requirements.in file

kiwi-json

Usage

If you use your own JSON encoder as a class, use default_encoder() in there.

import simplejson
from kw.json import default_encoder, mask_dict

class OurJSONEncoder(simplejson.JSONEncoder):

    def default(self, obj):
        return default_encoder(obj, mask_dict)

kiwi-json provides a simple implementation for masking dictionary values with kw.json.mask_dict. Or you can create a masking function for it by yourself. It supports customizing placeholder, blacklist and whitelist:

from kw.json import mask_dict_factory

mask_dict = mask_dict_factory(placeholder='0_0', blacklist={'secret'}, whitelist={'not-so-secret'})

If you want to use json.dumps directly, you can do it the following way:

import simplejson
from kw.json import default_encoder

dumps = partial(simplejson.dumps, default=default_encoder)

If you have simplejson installed, you can use Decimal as JSON number type:

from decimal import Decimal
from kw.json import dumps, loads

assert dumps({"num": Decimal("1.234")}, use_decimal=True) == '{"num": 1.234}'
assert loads('{"num": 1.234}', use_decimal=True) == {"num": Decimal("1.234")}

Flask-based application could utilize the extension:

from kw.json.flask import JSONExtension


def create_app():
    ...
    JSONExtension(app)
    ...

Extension will install an encoder to given app.

If you want to make sure that the encoder dumps classes, you can use the raw_encoder:

from kw.json import raw_encoder, dumps

dumps(data, default=raw_encoder)

To dump dates and datetimes as unix time, use date_as_unix_time=True:

import arrow
from datetime import datetime
from kw.json import dumps

dumps({1: datetime.now(), 2: arrow.now()}, date_as_unix_time=True)

If you want to combine the powers of date_as_unix_time and raw_encoder, you can create your own encoder using partial:

from kw.json import dumps, raw_encoder
from functools import partial

my_encoder = partial(raw_encoder, date_as_unix_time=True)
dumps(obj, default=my_encoder)

Running tests

To run the tests we use tox. Before you can run the tests please make sure you have postgres database running and the DATABASE_URI env variable set

export DATABASE_URI='postgres://[username]:[password]@[host]:[port]/[database]'

Once you have this set up just execute:

tox