Get rid of Mongo $ signs in JSON

Question

I am building python backend for SPA (Angular) using MongoDB.

Here is what I use: Python 3.4, MongoDB 3, Flask, flask-mongoe

Answer 1

If you are confident you want to get rid of all the similar cases, then you can certainly write code that matches that pattern. For example:

info = [
    {
        "_id": {
            "$oid": "55c737029380f82fbf52eec3"
        },
        "created_at": {
            "$date": 1439129906376
        },
        "desc": "Description.....",
        "title": "This is title"
    },
    #etc...
]

def fix_array(info):
    ''' Change out dict items in the following case:
           - dict value is another dict
           - the sub-dictionary only has one entry
           - the key in the subdictionary starts with '$'
        In this specific case, one level of indirection
        is removed, and the dict value is replaced with
        the sub-dict value.
    '''
    for item in info:
        for key, value in item.items():
            if not isinstance(value, dict) or len(value) != 1:
                continue
            (subkey, subvalue), = value.items()
            if not subkey.startswith('$'):
                continue
            item[key] = subvalue

fix_array(info)
print(info)

This will return this:

[{'title': 'This is title', 'created_at': 1439129906376, 'desc': 'Description.....', '_id': '55c737029380f82fbf52eec3'}]

Obviously, reformatting that with JSON is trivial.