PyMongo Converting between BSON and JSON Using the json module with custom handlers

Example

If all you need is serializing mongo results into json, it is possible to use the json module, provided you define custom handlers to deal with non-serializable fields types. One advantage is that you have full power on how you encode specific fields, like the datetime representation.

Here is a handler which encodes dates using the iso representation and the id as an hexadecimal string:

import pymongo
import json 
import datetime
import bson.objectid

def my_handler(x):
    if isinstance(x, datetime.datetime):
        return x.isoformat()
    elif isinstance(x, bson.objectid.ObjectId):
        return str(x)
    else:
        raise TypeError(x)

db = pymongo.MongoClient().samples
record = db.movies.find_one()
# {u'_id': ObjectId('5692a15524de1e0ce2dfcfa3'), u'title': u'Toy Story 4',
#   u'released': datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 18, 4, 0),}

json_record = json.dumps(record, default=my_handler)
# '{"_id": "5692a15524de1e0ce2dfcfa3", "title": "Toy Story 4", 
#    "released": "2010-06-18T04:00:00"}'