On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 11:06 PM Jon Ribbens via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote: > > On 2020-07-06, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 10:11 PM Jon Ribbens via Python-list > ><python-list@python.org> wrote: > >> 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. > > It is not. Tuples don't exist either, and yet they're supported.
Hmm, I didn't know that. Possibly it's as much a bug as the inf/nan issue. > >> 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. > > The 'json' module already fails to provide round-trip functionality: > > >>> for data in ({True: 1}, {1: 2}, (1, 2)): > ... if json.loads(json.dumps(data)) != data: > ... print('oops', data, json.loads(json.dumps(data))) > ... > oops {True: 1} {'true': 1} > oops {1: 2} {'1': 2} > oops (1, 2) [1, 2] There's a fundamental limitation of JSON in that it requires string keys, so this is an obvious transformation. I suppose you could call that one a bug too, but it's very useful and not too dangerous. (And then there's the tuple-to-list transformation, which I think probably shouldn't happen, although I don't think that's likely to cause issues either.) > > Maybe what people want is a pretty printer instead? > > No. I want a JSON encoder to output JSON to be read by a JSON decoder. Does it need to round-trip, though? If you stringify your datetimes, you can't decode it reliably any more. What's the purpose here? ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list