"TypeError: (Integer) is not JSON serializable" when serializing JSON in Python?

I am trying to send a simple dictionary to a json file from python, but I keep getting the "TypeError: 1425 is not JSON serializable" message.

import json
alerts = {'upper':[1425],'lower':[576],'level':[2],'datetime':['2012-08-08 15:30']}
afile = open('test.json','w')
afile.write(json.dumps(alerts,encoding='UTF-8'))
afile.close()

If I add the default argument, then it writes, but the integer values are written to the json file as strings, which is undesirable.

afile.write(json.dumps(alerts,encoding='UTF-8',default=str))

Solution 1:

I found my problem. The issue was that my integers were actually type numpy.int64.

Solution 2:

It seems like there may be a issue to dump numpy.int64 into json string in Python 3 and the python team already have a conversation about it. More details can be found here.

There is a workaround provided by Serhiy Storchaka. It works very well so I paste it here:

def convert(o):
    if isinstance(o, numpy.int64): return int(o)  
    raise TypeError

json.dumps({'value': numpy.int64(42)}, default=convert)