Sick of rewriting the same JSON datetime handling code for each project? jsondate is a drop-in replacement for Python's standard json library that adds sensible handling of datetime and date objects.
jsondate uses ISO8601 for encoding datetime objects and the date-specific part of ISO6801 for encoding date objects.
Example:
import datetime
import jsondate as json
>>> data = json.dumps(dict(created_at=datetime.datetime(2012, 10, 31)))
'{"created_at": "2012-10-31T00:00:00Z"}'
>>> json.loads(data)
{u'created_at': datetime.datetime(2012, 10, 31, 0, 0)}
>>> date = json.dumps(dict(date=datetime.date(2012, 10, 31)))
'{"date": "2012-10-31"}'
>>> json.loads(data)
{u'created_at': datetime.date(2012, 10, 31)}The json standard library module will return unicode objects for all strings except empty strings, which are returned as str objects.
This inconsistency can be annoying when using libraries that expect all input to be unicode.
jsondate fixes this by returning empty-strings as unicode objects as well.