python-rapidjson

Python wrapper around RapidJSON

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.

Getting Started

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)
'{"foo":100,"bar":"baz"}'
>>> 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"}'

Development

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

Note

The --recursive option is needed because we use a submodule to include RapidJSON sources. Alternatively you can do a plain clone immediately followed by a git submodule update --init.

Alternatively, if you already have (a compatible version of) RapidJSON includes around, you can compile the module specifying their location with the option --rj-include-dir, for example:

$ 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.

Performance

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.

Incompatibility

Although we tried to implement an API similar to the standard library json, being a strict drop-in replacement in not our goal and we have decided to depart from there in some aspects. See this section in the documentation for further details.