Can I get JSON to load into an OrderedDict?

Ok so I can use an OrderedDict in json.dump. That is, an OrderedDict can be used as an input to JSON.

But can it be used as an output? If so how? In my case I'd like to load into an OrderedDict so I can keep the order of the keys in the file.

If not, is there some kind of workaround?

Yes, you can. By specifying the object_pairs_hook argument to JSONDecoder. In fact, this is the exact example given in the documentation.

>>> json.JSONDecoder(object_pairs_hook=collections.OrderedDict).decode('{"foo":1, "bar": 2}')
OrderedDict([('foo', 1), ('bar', 2)])
>>> 

You can pass this parameter to json.loads (if you don't need a Decoder instance for other purposes) like so:

>>> import json
>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> data = json.loads('{"foo":1, "bar": 2}', object_pairs_hook=OrderedDict)
>>> print json.dumps(data, indent=4)
{
    "foo": 1,
    "bar": 2
}
>>> 

Using json.load is done in the same way:

>>> data = json.load(open('config.json'), object_pairs_hook=OrderedDict)

Simple version for Python 2.7+

my_ordered_dict = json.loads(json_str, object_pairs_hook=collections.OrderedDict)

Or for Python 2.4 to 2.6

import simplejson as json
import ordereddict

my_ordered_dict = json.loads(json_str, object_pairs_hook=ordereddict.OrderedDict)

Some great news! Since version 3.6 the cPython implementation has preserved the insertion order of dictionaries (https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-September/146327.html). This means that the json library is now order preserving by default. Observe the difference in behaviour between python 3.5 and 3.6. The code:

import json
data = json.loads('{"foo":1, "bar":2, "fiddle":{"bar":2, "foo":1}}')
print(json.dumps(data, indent=4))

In py3.5 the resulting order is undefined:

{
    "fiddle": {
        "bar": 2,
        "foo": 1
    },
    "bar": 2,
    "foo": 1
}

In the cPython implementation of python 3.6:

{
    "foo": 1,
    "bar": 2,
    "fiddle": {
        "bar": 2,
        "foo": 1
    }
}

The really great news is that this has become a language specification as of python 3.7 (as opposed to an implementation detail of cPython 3.6+): https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2017-December/151283.html

So the answer to your question now becomes: upgrade to python 3.6! :)

You could always write out the list of keys in addition to dumping the dict, and then reconstruct the OrderedDict by iterating through the list?

In addition to dumping the ordered list of keys alongside the dictionary, another low-tech solution, which has the advantage of being explicit, is to dump the (ordered) list of key-value pairs ordered_dict.items(); loading is a simple OrderedDict(<list of key-value pairs>). This handles an ordered dictionary despite the fact that JSON does not have this concept (JSON dictionaries have no order).

It is indeed nice to take advantage of the fact that json dumps the OrderedDict in the correct order. However, it is in general unnecessarily heavy and not necessarily meaningful to have to read all JSON dictionaries as an OrderedDict (through the object_pairs_hook argument), so an explicit conversion of only the dictionaries that must be ordered makes sense too.

The normally used load command will work if you specify the object_pairs_hook parameter:

import json
from  collections import OrderedDict
with open('foo.json', 'r') as fp:
    metrics_types = json.load(fp, object_pairs_hook=OrderedDict)