Authors:	Ken Robbins <ken@kenrobbins.com> Lele Gaifax <lele@metapensiero.it>
License:	MIT License
Status:

RapidJSON is an extremely fast C++ JSON parser and serialization library: this module wraps it into a Python 3 extension, exposing its serialization/deserialization (to/from either bytes, str or file-like instances) and JSON Schema validation capabilities.

Latest version documentation is automatically rendered by Read the Docs.

First install python-rapidjson:

$ pip install python-rapidjson

or, if you prefer Conda:

$ conda install -c conda-forge python-rapidjson

Basic usage looks like this:

>>> import rapidjson
>>> data = {'foo': 100, 'bar': 'baz'}
>>> rapidjson.dumps(data)
'{"bar":"baz","foo":100}'
>>> rapidjson.loads('{"bar":"baz","foo":100}')
{'bar': 'baz', 'foo': 100}
>>>
>>> class Stream:
...   def write(self, data):
...      print("Chunk:", data)
...
>>> rapidjson.dump(data, Stream(), chunk_size=5)
Chunk: b'{"foo'
Chunk: b'":100'
Chunk: b',"bar'
Chunk: b'":"ba'
Chunk: b'z"}'

If you want to install the development version (maybe to contribute fixes or enhancements) you may clone the repository:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/python-rapidjson/python-rapidjson.git

$ python3 setup.py build --rj-include-dir=/usr/include/rapidjson

A set of makefiles implement most common operations, such as build, check and release; see make help output for a list of available targets.

python-rapidjson tries to be as performant as possible while staying compatible with the json module.

See the this section in the documentation for a comparison with other JSON libraries.

Here are things in the standard json library supports that we have decided not to support:

separators argument

This is mostly used for pretty printing and not supported by RapidJSON so it isn't a high priority. We do support indent kwarg that would get you nice looking JSON anyways.

Coercing keys when dumping

json will stringify a True dictionary key as "true" if you dump it out but when you load it back in it'll still be a string. We want the dump and load to return the exact same objects so we have decided not to do this coercion by default; you can however use MM_COERCE_KEYS_TO_STRINGS or MM_CHECK_STRING_KEYS to mimic that.

Arbitrary encodings

json.loads() accepts an encoding kwarg determining the encoding of its input, when that is a bytes or bytearray instance. Although RapidJSON is able to cope with several different encodings, we currently support only the recommended one, UTF-8.