How to Convert Object to JSON and ViceVersa in Python?

Summary: In this tutorial, we will learn how to convert an object into JSON and viceversa in Python.

Convert Python Object to JSON

The json.dumps() method of the json module converts a dictionary into a JSON string.

json inspired by JavaScript is a Python inbuilt module used to work with JSON data.

Syntax:

json_string = json.dumps(<dictionary_object>)

We can use the json.dumps() method to convert an object in Python into JSON. All we need to do is to pass the dictionary representation of the object as a parameter to this method.

where object.__dict__ is the dictionary representation of Python object.

Example:

import json

class Student:
    def __init__(self, name, roll_no):
        self.name = name
        self.roll_no = roll_no
        
#object
student_obj = Student("Pencil Programmer", 7)

#JSON
student_json = json.dumps(student_obj.__dict__)

print(student_json)

Output:

{“name”: “Pencil Programmer”, “roll_no”: 7}

Convert JSON to Python Object

The json.loads() method of json module converts a JSON string into a Python dictionary (opposite of json.dumps()).

Syntax:

object_dict= json.loads(json_string)

We can use the dictionary returned by the json.loads() method as keywords arguments (**kwargs) to construct an object of a given Python class.

Example:

import json

class Student:
    def __init__(self, name, roll_no):
        self.name = name
        self.roll_no = roll_no
        
#JSON
student_json = '{"name": "Pencil Programmer", "roll_no": 7}'

#dictionary
student_dict = json.loads(student_json)

#object
student_obj = Student(**student_dict)

print("Name: ", student_obj.name)
print("Roll: ", student_obj.roll_no)

Output:

Name: Pencil Programmer
Roll: 7

It is important to note that, json.load() and json.loads() are two different methods.

• json.load() reads JSON encoded data and convert it into a Python dictionary.
• json.loads() parse JSON string into Python dictionary.