Last Updated: May 22, 2026
JSON is how most web services, configuration files, and inter-service messages move data around. Python's standard library ships a json module that converts between JSON text and Python objects with two pairs of functions: loads/load for parsing and dumps/dump for writing. This lesson covers the type mapping, the four core functions, the formatting options that matter, the errors you'll hit, and how to extend the encoder and decoder for types JSON doesn't know about.