How to convert a pymongo.cursor.Cursor into a dict?

Question

I am using pymongo to query for all items in a region (actually it is to query for all venues in a region on a map). I used db.command(SON()) before to search i

Answer 1

The find method returns a Cursor instance, which allows you to iterate over all matching documents.

To get the first document that matches the given criteria you need to use find_one. The result of find_one is a dictionary.

You can always use the list constructor to return a list of all the documents in the collection but bear in mind that this will load all the data in memory and may not be what you want.

You should do that if you need to reuse the cursor and have a good reason not to use rewind()

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Demo using find:

>>> import pymongo
>>> conn = pymongo.MongoClient()
>>> db = conn.test #test is my database
>>> col = db.spam #Here spam is my collection
>>> cur = col.find()  
>>> cur

>>> for doc in cur:
...     print(doc)  # or do something with the document
... 
{'a': 1, '_id': ObjectId('54ff30faadd8f30feb90268f'), 'b': 2}
{'a': 1, 'c': 3, '_id': ObjectId('54ff32a2add8f30feb902690'), 'b': 2}

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Demo using find_one:

>>> col.find_one()
{'a': 1, '_id': ObjectId('54ff30faadd8f30feb90268f'), 'b': 2}