1. Introduction

With the increasing interaction between Python applications and web interfaces, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) has become a critical format for data interchange. Python arrays, often used for their efficiency with typed data, occasionally need to be converted to JSON for web consumption. In this post, we'll look at how to convert a Python array into a JSON array.

Definition

JSON is a lightweight format that is used for data interchange between servers and web applications. Converting a Python array to JSON involves serializing the array data into a JSON format string. Serialization is the process of converting a data structure into a string that can be transmitted or stored, and later reconstructed. Python's json module facilitates this with its dumps() method.

2. Program Steps

1. Import Python's built-in array and json modules.

2. Initialize an array with the elements that need to be converted to JSON.

3. Use the json.dumps() method to convert the array to a JSON formatted string.

4. Output the JSON string.

3. Code Program

# Step 1: Import the necessary modules
import array
import json

# Step 2: Initialize an array with numeric elements
num_array = array.array('i', [1, 2, 3, 4, 5])

# Step 3: Convert the array to a JSON string
json_array = json.dumps(num_array.tolist())

# Step 4: Print the JSON formatted string
print(json_array)

Output:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Explanation:

1. Both the array module (for array manipulation) and the json module (for serialization) are imported.

2. num_array is defined as an array of integers. The 'i' type code specifies signed integers.

3. json_array is the JSON string representation of num_array. We first convert the array to a list using tolist() and then serialize it to a JSON string with json.dumps().

4. The print() function outputs json_array showing the array as a JSON array, which is denoted by square brackets containing the integer elements.