JSON serialize a dictionary with tuples as key

Is there a way in Python to serialize a dictionary that is using a tuple as key?

e.g.

a = {(1, 2): 'a'}

simply using json.dumps(a) raises this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/json/__init__.py", line 230, in dumps
    return _default_encoder.encode(obj)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/json/encoder.py", line 367, in encode
    chunks = list(self.iterencode(o))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/json/encoder.py", line 309, in _iterencode
    for chunk in self._iterencode_dict(o, markers):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/json/encoder.py", line 268, in _iterencode_dict
    raise TypeError("key {0!r} is not a string".format(key))
TypeError: key (1, 2) is not a string

You can't serialize that as json, json has a much less flexible idea about what counts as a dict key than python.

You could transform the mapping into a sequence of key, value pairs, something like this:

import json
def remap_keys(mapping):
    return [{'key':k, 'value': v} for k, v in mapping.iteritems()]
... 
json.dumps(remap_keys({(1, 2): 'foo'}))
>>> '[{"value": "foo", "key": [1, 2]}]'

from json import loads, dumps
from ast import literal_eval

x = {(0, 1): 'la-la la', (0, 2): 'extricate'}

# save: convert each tuple key to a string before saving as json object
s = dumps({str(k): v for k, v in x.items()})

# load in two stages:
# (i) load json object
obj = loads(s)

# (ii) convert loaded keys from string back to tuple
d = {literal_eval(k): v for k, v in obj.items()}

See https://stackoverflow.com/a/12337657/2455413.

JSON only supports strings as keys. You'll need to choose a way to represent those tuples as strings.

You could just use str((1,2)) as key because json only expects the keys as strings but if you use this you'll have to use a[str((1,2))] to get the value.

json can only accept strings as keys for dict, what you can do, is to replace the tuple keys with string like so

with open("file", "w") as f:
    k = dic.keys() 
    v = dic.values() 
    k1 = [str(i) for i in k]
    json.dump(json.dumps(dict(zip(*[k1,v]))),f)

And than when you want to read it, you can change the keys back to tuples using

with open("file", r) as f:
    data = json.load(f)
    dic = json.loads(data)
    k = dic.keys() 
    v = dic.values() 
    k1 = [eval(i) for i in k] 
    return dict(zip(*[k1,v]))

JSON serialize a dictionary with tuples as key

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