JSON datetime between Python and JavaScript

javascript python json
kevin picture kevin · Jan 18, 2009 · Viewed 188k times · Source

I want to send a datetime.datetime object in serialized form from Python using JSON and de-serialize in JavaScript using JSON. What is the best way to do this?

Answer

JT. picture JT. · Apr 21, 2010

You can add the 'default' parameter to json.dumps to handle this:

date_handler = lambda obj: (
    obj.isoformat()
    if isinstance(obj, (datetime.datetime, datetime.date))
    else None
)
json.dumps(datetime.datetime.now(), default=date_handler)
'"2010-04-20T20:08:21.634121"'

Which is ISO 8601 format.

A more comprehensive default handler function:

def handler(obj):
    if hasattr(obj, 'isoformat'):
        return obj.isoformat()
    elif isinstance(obj, ...):
        return ...
    else:
        raise TypeError, 'Object of type %s with value of %s is not JSON serializable' % (type(obj), repr(obj))

Update: Added output of type as well as value.
Update: Also handle date

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