How can I overcome "datetime.datetime not JSON serializable"?

I had encountered the same problem when externalizing a Django model object to dump as JSON.

Here is how you can solve it.

def externalize(model_obj):
  keys = model_obj._meta.get_all_field_names()
  data = {}
  for key in keys:
    if key == 'date_time':
      date_time_obj = getattr(model_obj, key)
      data[key] = date_time_obj.strftime("%A %d. %B %Y")
    else:
      data[key] = getattr(model_obj, key)
  return data

I faced this issue today, I found something called pickle. It's a built-in library for serializing Python objects and also load it from a pickle file.

The only difference I found between pickle and json is pickle file is a binary file, whereas json is a usual text file.

And it doesn't cause any issues with datetime objects.

Another approach is to adopt a concept from FEEL (the Friendly Enough Expression Language) defined in DMN (Decision Model Notation) - namely @strings.

Any string starting with @" and ending with " is decoded separately with FEEL decoding. Of course the sender and the receiver have to agree to this convention, but ... the code below lets you encode lots of other things as well as dates, times, date/times, timedeltas.

You can encode year/month durations and ranges (so long as you except a 4 element tuple of chr, expr, expr, chr as being a good representation of a range - where the two chrs are open/close brackets). So, @"P4Y2M" is a duration of 4 years and 2 months. @"P2DT5H" is a timedelta of 2 days and 4 hours, @"(2021-01-02 .. 2021-12-31)" is a year range.

The following code can be used to serialize and de-serialize @strings.

import datetime
import pySFeel

parser = pySFeel.SFeelParser()


def convertAtString(thisString):
    # Convert an @string
    (status, newValue) = parser.sFeelParse(thisString[2:-1])
    if 'errors' in status:
        return thisString
    else:
        return newValue


def convertIn(newValue):
    if isinstance(newValue, dict):
        for key in newValue:
            if isinstance(newValue[key], int):
                newValue[key] = float(newValue[key])
            elif isinstance(newValue[key], str) and (newValue[key][0:2] == '@"') and (newValue[key][-1] == '"'):
                newValue[key] = convertAtString(newValue[key])
            elif isinstance(newValue[key], dict) or isinstance(newValue[key], list):
                newValue[key] = convertIn(newValue[key])
    elif isinstance(newValue, list):
        for i in range(len(newValue)):
            if isinstance(newValue[i], int):
                newValue[i] = float(newValue[i])
            elif isinstance(newValue[i], str) and (newValue[i][0:2] == '@"') and (newValue[i][-1] == '"'):
                newValue[i] = convertAtString(newValue[i])
            elif isinstance(newValue[i], dict) or isinstance(newValue[i], list):
                newValue[i] = convertIn(newValue[i])
    elif isinstance(newValue, str) and (newValue[0:2] == '@"') and (newValue[-1] == '"'):
        newValue = convertAtString(newValue)
    return newValue


  def convertOut(thisValue):
      if isinstance(thisValue, datetime.date):
          return '@"' + thisValue.isoformat() + '"'
      elif isinstance(thisValue, datetime.datetime):
          return '@"' + thisValue.isoformat(sep='T') + '"'
      elif isinstance(thisValue, datetime.time):
          return '@"' + thisValue.isoformat() + '"'
      elif isinstance(thisValue, datetime.timedelta):
          sign = ''
          duration = thisValue.total_seconds()
          if duration < 0:
              duration = -duration
              sign = '-'
          secs = duration % 60
          duration = int(duration / 60)
          mins = duration % 60
          duration = int(duration / 60)
          hours = duration % 24
          days = int(duration / 24)
          return '@"%sP%dDT%dH%dM%fS"' % (sign, days, hours, mins, secs)
      elif isinstance(thisValue, bool):
          return thisValue:
      elif thisValue is None:
          return thisValue:
      elif isinstance(thisValue, int):
          sign = ''
          if thisValue < 0:
              thisValue = -thisValue
              sign = '-'
          years = int(thisValue / 12)
          months = (thisValue % 12)
          return '@"%sP%dY%dM"' % (sign, years, months)
      elif isinstance(thisValue, tuple) and (len(thisValue) == 4):
          (lowEnd, lowVal, highVal, highEnd) = thisValue
          return '@"' + lowEnd + str(lowVal) + ' .. ' + str(highVal) + highEnd
      elif thisValue is None:
          return 'null'
      elif isinstance(thisValue, dict):
          for item in thisValue:
              thisValue[item] = convertOut(thisValue[item])
          return thisValue
      elif isinstance(thisValue, list):
          for i in range(len(thisValue)):
              thisValue[i] = convertOut(thisValue[i])
          return thisValue
      else:
          return thisValue

Use:

def j_serial(o):     # Self-contained
    from datetime import datetime, date
    return str(o).split('.')[0] if isinstance(o, (datetime, date)) else None

Usage of the above utility:

import datetime
serial_d = j_serial(datetime.datetime.now())
if serial_d:
    print(serial_d)  # Output: 2018-02-28 02:23:15

You can also use Pydantic.

import datetime

import pydantic  # pip install pydantic


class MyModel(pydantic.BaseModel):
    title: str
    somedate: datetime.datetime

my_object = MyModel(title="String", somedate=datetime.datetime.now())
my_object.model_dump_json()  # '{"title":"String","somedate":"2025-05-14T13:36:33.690068"}'

It knows that it has to convert datetimes to string. It also know it has to parse them when converting from json to Model : MyModel(title="String", somedate="2025-05-14T13:36:33.690068") works fine.

I may not 100% correct but, this is the simple way to do serialize

#!/usr/bin/python
import datetime,json

sampledict = {}
sampledict['a'] = "some string"
sampledict['b'] = datetime.datetime.now()

print sampledict   # output : {'a': 'some string', 'b': datetime.datetime(2017, 4, 15, 5, 15, 34, 652996)}

#print json.dumps(sampledict)

'''
output : 

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./jsonencodedecode.py", line 10, in <module>
    print json.dumps(sampledict)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 244, in dumps
    return _default_encoder.encode(obj)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 207, in encode
    chunks = self.iterencode(o, _one_shot=True)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 270, in iterencode
    return _iterencode(o, 0)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 184, in default
    raise TypeError(repr(o) + " is not JSON serializable")
TypeError: datetime.datetime(2017, 4, 15, 5, 16, 17, 435706) is not JSON serializable


'''

sampledict['b'] = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%B %d, %Y %H:%M %p")

afterdump = json.dumps(sampledict)

print afterdump  #output : {"a": "some string", "b": "April 15, 2017 05:18 AM"}

print type(afterdump) #<type 'str'>


afterloads = json.loads(afterdump) 

print afterloads # output : {u'a': u'some string', u'b': u'April 15, 2017 05:18 AM'}


print type(afterloads) # output :<type 'dict'>