TypeError: <built-in function id> is not JSON serializable

gerrit, httplib, json, python

Solution

The error message says it all - you have the `id` function inside your `req` dictionary:

req = {"jsonrpc" : "2.0", 
  "method": "changeDetail",
  "params": [{"id": id}],
#                    ^- here
  "id": 44
}

Functions are not json serializable, so that's why you get the error.

On a side note - if you wanted to pass a variable instead, you've not initialized it before using it. Avoid using names of builtins as variable names (like `id`, `int`, ...) to avoid this kind of problem.

Problem

I'm trying to make a connection to this website "android-review.googlesource.com" through "httplib.HTTPSConnection" which actually is Gerrit (a tool for reviewing code), Gerrit API provides an interface to JSON formatted review data. I need to gather JSON data then. You can find more information about Gerrit here: https://gerritreview.googlesource.com/Documentation/rest-api.html Let me explain a bit about source code. There is a function called "GetRequestOrCached" which saves data in a file for cache usage and another function "MakeRequest" which creates a connection to website and return the response. But error is related to the part which json.dumps is used for a request (req) which request is a dictionary. This is the error: ``` TypeError: <built-in function id> is not JSON serializable ``` This is the code: ``` import socket, sys import httplib import pyodbc import json import types import datetime import urllib2 import os import logging import re, time def GetRequestOrCached( url, method, data, filename): path = os.path.join("json", filename) if not os.path.exists(path): data = MakeRequest(url, method, data) time.sleep(1) data = data.replace(")]}'", "") f = open(path, "w") f.write(data) f.close() return open(path).read() def MakeRequest(url, method, data, port=443): successful = False while not successful: try: conn = httplib.HTTPSConnection("android-review.googlesource.com", port) headers = {"Accept": "application/json,application/jsonrequest", "Content-Type": "application/json; charset=UTF-8", "Content-Length": len(data)} conn.request(method, url, data, headers) conn.set_debuglevel(1) successful = True except socket.error as err: # this means a socket timeout if err.errno != 10060: raise(err) else: print err.errno, str(err) print "sleep for 1 minute before retrying" time.sleep(60) resp = conn.getresponse() if resp.status != 200: raise GerritDataException("Got status code %d for request to %s" % (resp.status, url)) return resp.read() #------------------------------------------------- filename = "%d-ChangeDetails.json" url = "/gerrit_ui/rpc/ChangeDetailService" req = {"jsonrpc" : "2.0", "method": "changeDetail", "params": [{"id": id}], "id": 44 } data = GetRequestOrCached(url, "POST", json.dumps(req), filename) print json.loads(data) ``` This line causes the error "data = GetRequestOrCached(url, "POST", json.dumps(req), filename)". I will appreciate if the one who fixes the error also check to see if the response from website is an error or a correct response.

Original source