Question

I have a Decimal('3.9') as part of an object, and wish to encode this to a JSON string which should look like {'x': 3.9}. I don’t care about precision on the client side, so a float is fine.

Is there a good way to serialize this? JSONDecoder doesn’t accept Decimal objects, and converting to a float beforehand yields {'x': 3.8999999999999999} which is wrong, and will be a big waste of bandwidth.

Answer 1

How about subclassing json.JSONEncoder?

class DecimalEncoder(json.JSONEncoder):
    def default(self, o):
        if isinstance(o, decimal.Decimal):
            # wanted a simple yield str(o) in the next line,
            # but that would mean a yield on the line with super(...),
            # which wouldn't work (see my comment below), so...
            return (str(o) for o in [o])
        return super(DecimalEncoder, self).default(o)

Then use it like so:

json.dumps({'x': decimal.Decimal('5.5')}, cls=DecimalEncoder)