How to Write JSON Data in Python

In this article, we show how to write JSON data in Python.

JSON data and Python data look almost identical.

This is a subtle difference but an important one, since you should not send Python-formatted data to a JSON file.

So, to encode data in JSON, or write JSON data, you take the dictionary in Python and encode it with the json.dumps() function.

The json_dumps() function will convert a dictionary in Python to data in JSON format.

When you convert a dictionary to JSON data with the json_dumps() function, the data type will change from type dict to type str.

So, below we create a dictionary in Python and encode this to JSON format.

import json person= { 'name': 'David', 'age':29, 'race': 'black' } json_string= json.dumps(person) #now JSON data

So, the first thing we must do is import the json module.

We then create a dictionary called person. This dictionary contains name, age, and race attributes.

This is Python data in the form of a dictionary.

To make this data JSON data, we use the json_dumps() function and input as the parameter the Python dictionary data. This encodes the Python data to JSON data. We save this in the variable json_string.

If you were to now get the data type of json_string, you would now see that the data is of type string (str). It is no longer a dictionary.

And this is how you can write, or encode, JSON data from Python data.

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