Serializing a Python namedtuple to json

Question

What is the recommended way of serializing a namedtuple to json with the field names retained?

Serializing a namedtuple to json results in only the valu

Answer 1

It's impossible to serialize namedtuples correctly with the native python json library. It will always see tuples as lists, and it is impossible to override the default serializer to change this behaviour. It's worse if objects are nested.

Better to use a more robust library like orjson:

import orjson
from typing import NamedTuple

class Rectangle(NamedTuple):
    width: int
    height: int

def default(obj):
    if hasattr(obj, '_asdict'):
        return obj._asdict()

rectangle = Rectangle(width=10, height=20)
print(orjson.dumps(rectangle, default=default))

=>

{
    "width":10,
    "height":20
}

Answer 2

This is pretty tricky, since namedtuple() is a factory which returns a new type derived from tuple. One approach would be to have your class also inherit from UserDict.DictMixin, but tuple.__getitem__ is already defined and expects an integer denoting the position of the element, not the name of its attribute:

>>> f = foobar('a', 1)
>>> f[0]
'a'

At its heart the namedtuple is an odd fit for JSON, since it is really a custom-built type whose key names are fixed as part of the type definition, unlike a dictionary where key names are stored inside the instance. This prevents you from "round-tripping" a namedtuple, e.g. you cannot decode a dictionary back into a namedtuple without some other a piece of information, like an app-specific type marker in the dict {'a': 1, '#_type': 'foobar'}, which is a bit hacky.

This is not ideal, but if you only need to encode namedtuples into dictionaries, another approach is to extend or modify your JSON encoder to special-case these types. Here is an example of subclassing the Python json.JSONEncoder. This tackles the problem of ensuring that nested namedtuples are properly converted to dictionaries:

from collections import namedtuple
from json import JSONEncoder

class MyEncoder(JSONEncoder):

    def _iterencode(self, obj, markers=None):
        if isinstance(obj, tuple) and hasattr(obj, '_asdict'):
            gen = self._iterencode_dict(obj._asdict(), markers)
        else:
            gen = JSONEncoder._iterencode(self, obj, markers)
        for chunk in gen:
            yield chunk

class foobar(namedtuple('f', 'foo, bar')):
    pass

enc = MyEncoder()
for obj in (foobar('a', 1), ('a', 1), {'outer': foobar('x', 'y')}):
    print enc.encode(obj)

{"foo": "a", "bar": 1}
["a", 1]
{"outer": {"foo": "x", "bar": "y"}}

Answer 3

Here is my take on the problem. It serializes the NamedTuple, takes care of folded NamedTuples and Lists inside of them

def recursive_to_dict(obj: Any) -> dict:
_dict = {}

if isinstance(obj, tuple):
    node = obj._asdict()
    for item in node:
        if isinstance(node[item], list): # Process as a list
            _dict[item] = [recursive_to_dict(x) for x in (node[item])]
        elif getattr(node[item], "_asdict", False): # Process as a NamedTuple
            _dict[item] = recursive_to_dict(node[item])
        else: # Process as a regular element
            _dict[item] = (node[item])
return _dict

Answer 4

This is an old question. However:

A suggestion for all those with the same question, think carefully about using any of the private or internal features of the NamedTuple because they have before and will change again over time.

For example, if your NamedTuple is a flat value object and you're only interested in serializing it and not in cases where it is nested into another object, you could avoid the troubles that would come up with __dict__ being removed or _as_dict() changing and just do something like (and yes this is Python 3 because this answer is for the present):

from typing import NamedTuple

class ApiListRequest(NamedTuple):
  group: str="default"
  filter: str="*"

  def to_dict(self):
    return {
      'group': self.group,
      'filter': self.filter,
    }

  def to_json(self):
    return json.dumps(self.to_dict())

I tried to use the default callable kwarg to dumps in order to do the to_dict() call if available, but that didn't get called as the NamedTuple is convertible to a list.

Answer 5

If it's just one namedtuple you're looking to serialize, using its _asdict() method will work (with Python >= 2.7)

>>> from collections import namedtuple
>>> import json
>>> FB = namedtuple("FB", ("foo", "bar"))
>>> fb = FB(123, 456)
>>> json.dumps(fb._asdict())
'{"foo": 123, "bar": 456}'