Serialising an Enum member to JSON

I know this is old but I feel this will help people. I just went through this exact problem and discovered if you're using string enums, declaring your enums as a subclass of str works well for almost all situations:

import json
from enum import Enum

class LogLevel(str, Enum):
    DEBUG = 'DEBUG'
    INFO = 'INFO'

print(LogLevel.DEBUG)
print(json.dumps(LogLevel.DEBUG))
print(json.loads('"DEBUG"'))
print(LogLevel('DEBUG'))

Will output:

LogLevel.DEBUG
"DEBUG"
DEBUG
LogLevel.DEBUG

As you can see, loading the JSON outputs the string DEBUG but it is easily castable back into a LogLevel object. A good option if you don't want to create a custom JSONEncoder.

The correct answer depends on what you intend to do with the serialized version.

If you are going to unserialize back into Python, see Zero's answer.

If your serialized version is going to another language then you probably want to use an IntEnum instead, which is automatically serialized as the corresponding integer:

from enum import IntEnum
import json

class Status(IntEnum):
    success = 0
    failure = 1

json.dumps(Status.success)

and this returns:

'0'

Serialising an Enum member to JSON

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