Python serialization Error

Question

When my python code trying to convert a dictionary object to Json string, it threw the following exception:

SerializationError: ({'status': 'rd', 
'name': 'Detecci\xf3nInt/.unclassified.ez', 'st': 0}, 
UnicodeDecodeError('utf8', 'Detecci\xf3nInt/.unclassified.ez', 7, 8, 
'invalid continuation byte'))

Any hints for fixing this problem please.

Answer 1

By default json.dump() uses UTF8 encoding, however, the value for the name key in your dictionary is not UTF8. It looks like one of the ISO-8859-X encodings. You can specify the encoding with the encoding parameter:

import json
d = {'status': 'rd', 'name': 'Detecci\xf3nInt/.unclassified.ez', 'st': 0}
s = json.dumps(d, encoding='ISO-8859-1')
print(s)

Output

{"status": "rd", "name": "Detecci\u00f3nInt/.unclassified.ez", "st": 0}

I had a bit of a guess as to which encoding to use, so you might want to check which is the correct encoding for your data.