How to fix Python MongoDB TypeError: Object of type ObjectId is not JSON serializable

Problem:

When trying to export data as JSON that has originally been queried from MongoDB using code like

with open("alle.json", "w") as outfile:
    json.dump(alle, outfile)

you see the following error message:

File /usr/lib/python3.9/json/__init__.py:179, in dump(obj, fp, skipkeys, ensure_ascii, check_circular, allow_nan, cls, indent, separators, default, sort_keys, **kw)
    173     iterable = cls(skipkeys=skipkeys, ensure_ascii=ensure_ascii,
    174         check_circular=check_circular, allow_nan=allow_nan, indent=indent,
    175         separators=separators,
    176         default=default, sort_keys=sort_keys, **kw).iterencode(obj)
    177 # could accelerate with writelines in some versions of Python, at
    178 # a debuggability cost
--> 179 for chunk in iterable:
    180     fp.write(chunk)

File /usr/lib/python3.9/json/encoder.py:429, in _make_iterencode.<locals>._iterencode(o, _current_indent_level)
    427     yield _floatstr(o)
    428 elif isinstance(o, (list, tuple)):
--> 429     yield from _iterencode_list(o, _current_indent_level)
    430 elif isinstance(o, dict):
    431     yield from _iterencode_dict(o, _current_indent_level)

File /usr/lib/python3.9/json/encoder.py:325, in _make_iterencode.<locals>._iterencode_list(lst, _current_indent_level)
    323         else:
    324             chunks = _iterencode(value, _current_indent_level)
--> 325         yield from chunks
    326 if newline_indent is not None:
    327     _current_indent_level -= 1

File /usr/lib/python3.9/json/encoder.py:405, in _make_iterencode.<locals>._iterencode_dict(dct, _current_indent_level)
    403         else:
    404             chunks = _iterencode(value, _current_indent_level)
--> 405         yield from chunks
    406 if newline_indent is not None:
    407     _current_indent_level -= 1

File /usr/lib/python3.9/json/encoder.py:438, in _make_iterencode.<locals>._iterencode(o, _current_indent_level)
    436         raise ValueError("Circular reference detected")
    437     markers[markerid] = o
--> 438 o = _default(o)
    439 yield from _iterencode(o, _current_indent_level)
    440 if markers is not None:

File /usr/lib/python3.9/json/encoder.py:179, in JSONEncoder.default(self, o)
    160 def default(self, o):
    161     """Implement this method in a subclass such that it returns
    162     a serializable object for ``o``, or calls the base implementation
    163     (to raise a ``TypeError``).
   (...)
    177 
    178     """
--> 179     raise TypeError(f'Object of type {o.__class__.__name__} '
    180                     f'is not JSON serializable')

TypeError: Object of type ObjectId is not JSON serializable

Solution

This error occurs because objects queried from PyMongo always contain _id which is of type ObjectId and the normal JSON library (or drop-in replacements like simplejson do not know how to create JSON representations of Objects of type ObjectId).

In order to fix this, use pymongo‘s json_util instead of json. Note that the bson.json_util package contains dumps but does not contain dump, so use the following snippet to write to a file:

import bson.json_util as json_util

with open("alle.json", "w") as outfile:
    outfile.write(json_util.dumps(alle))