Tuesday, May 8, 2007

JSON and Python

I hate XML.
I love JSON.

Now that I've made that clear, lets go into how I want Python to handle my JSON.
  1. I want a built-in function to JSONify.
  2. I want a built-in function to deJSONify.
Now in the Python world there are multiple JSON libraries. cJSON, simplejson, demjson and more. I've used a few of these and they all seem good. However, most have extraneous methods that I don't care about, or name their json handling methods funny. For example, simplejson has you do loads() and dumps() for loading and dumping of objects/strings, and load() and dump() for loading and dumping of files. Kind of nice, but all I really want is a JSONify and a deJSONify function from my JSON handler. I can do the rest!

So what I've thought about doing is writing a Python JSON package that would do the following:
  1. Load a JSON handling package. It would have a list to select from so that if simplejson was not already on your machine, it might check for cjson, demjson, etc and grab the alternate instead.
  2. Have a JSONify function that would convert Python objects to JSON.
  3. Have a deJSONify function to convert JSON into Python objects.
This looks like a fun and handy little project.

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