How to overcome “datetime.datetime not JSON serializable”?

Question

I have a basic dict as follows:

sample = {}
sample[\'title\'] = \"String\"
sample[\'somedate\'] = somedatetimehere
         


        

Answer 1

For others who do not need or want to use the pymongo library for this.. you can achieve datetime JSON conversion easily with this small snippet:

def default(obj):
    """Default JSON serializer."""
    import calendar, datetime

    if isinstance(obj, datetime.datetime):
        if obj.utcoffset() is not None:
            obj = obj - obj.utcoffset()
        millis = int(
            calendar.timegm(obj.timetuple()) * 1000 +
            obj.microsecond / 1000
        )
        return millis
    raise TypeError('Not sure how to serialize %s' % (obj,))

Then use it like so:

import datetime, json
print json.dumps(datetime.datetime.now(), default=default)

output: 

'1365091796124'