Question

Just getting started with Python, but the first goal is to create a web service. I plan on using werkzeug for this, however, all I will be doing is writing a client to interface with it. How would I go about exchanging objects between the 2 systems? Is there anything similar to JSON for Python?

EDIT:
A couple mentions of JSON, but my main problem is that I can’t serialize a class? I sort of thought that was what JSON could do?

class User():
    def __init__(self, first, last, age):
        self.first = first
        self.last = last
        self.age = age

user = User("John", "Doe", 25)
json.dumps(user)

TypeError: <__main__.User instance at 0x02ABBEE0> is not JSON serializable

I know what you are serializing in JSON isn’t necessarily a class, it is an object, but you can still reference it almost as such:

    var mailingAddress = { 
     "Address"    :   "123 Anywhere St.", 
     "City"       :   "Springfield", 
     "PostalCode" :   99999
};
alert("The package will be shipped to postal code " + mailingAddress.PostalCode);

Answer 1

Sounds like you’re looking to use pickle instead of json — pickles are Python specific but can handle user classes as well as dicts:

>>> class User():
    def __init__(self, first, last, age):
        self.first = first
        self.last = last
        self.age = age

>>> user = User("John", "Doe", 25)
>>> import pickle
>>> s = pickle.dumps(user)
>>> del user
>>> user = pickle.loads(s)    # reconstruct the object
>>> print vars(user)
{'age': 25, 'last': 'Doe', 'first': 'John'}

If you need a variant that is language independent, look at PyYAML and the YAML spec at http://yaml.org