SimpleJSON and NumPy array

Question

What is the most efficient way of serializing a numpy array using simplejson?

Answer 1

This shows how to convert from a 1D NumPy array to JSON and back to an array:

try:
    import json
except ImportError:
    import simplejson as json
import numpy as np

def arr2json(arr):
    return json.dumps(arr.tolist())
def json2arr(astr,dtype):
    return np.fromiter(json.loads(astr),dtype)

arr=np.arange(10)
astr=arr2json(arr)
print(repr(astr))
# '[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]'
dt=np.int32
arr=json2arr(astr,dt)
print(repr(arr))
# array([0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9])

---

Building on tlausch's answer, here is a way to JSON-encode a NumPy array while preserving shape and dtype of any NumPy array -- including those with complex dtype.

class NDArrayEncoder(json.JSONEncoder):
    def default(self, obj):
        if isinstance(obj, np.ndarray):
            output = io.BytesIO()
            np.savez_compressed(output, obj=obj)
            return {'b64npz' : base64.b64encode(output.getvalue())}
        return json.JSONEncoder.default(self, obj)


def ndarray_decoder(dct):
    if isinstance(dct, dict) and 'b64npz' in dct:
        output = io.BytesIO(base64.b64decode(dct['b64npz']))
        output.seek(0)
        return np.load(output)['obj']
    return dct

# Make expected non-contiguous structured array:
expected = np.arange(10)[::2]
expected = expected.view('