json.dumps vs flask.jsonify

python json flask
Sergei Basharov picture Sergei Basharov · Oct 26, 2011 · Viewed 319.8k times · Source

I am not sure I understand the purpose of the flask.jsonify method. I try to make a JSON string from this:

data = {"id": str(album.id), "title": album.title}

but what I get with json.dumps differs from what I get with flask.jsonify.

json.dumps(data): [{"id": "4ea856fd6506ae0db42702dd", "title": "Business"}]
flask.jsonify(data): {"id":…, "title":…}

Obviously I need to get a result that looks more like what json.dumps returns. What am I doing wrong?

Answer

Kenneth Wilke picture Kenneth Wilke · Nov 1, 2012

The jsonify() function in flask returns a flask.Response() object that already has the appropriate content-type header 'application/json' for use with json responses. Whereas, the json.dumps() method will just return an encoded string, which would require manually adding the MIME type header.

See more about the jsonify() function here for full reference.

Edit: Also, I've noticed that jsonify() handles kwargs or dictionaries, while json.dumps() additionally supports lists and others.

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