How do I `jsonify` a list in Flask?

Currently Flask would raise an error when jsonifying a list.

I know there could be security reasons https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/issues/170, but I still would like to have a way to return a JSON list like the following:

[    {'a': 1, 'b': 2},    {'a': 5, 'b': 10}]

instead of

{ 'results': [
    {'a': 1, 'b': 2},
    {'a': 5, 'b': 10}
]}

on responding to a application/json request. How can I return a JSON list in Flask using Jsonify?

You can't but you can do it anyway like this. I needed this for jQuery-File-Upload

import json
# get this object
from flask import Response

#example data:

    js = [ { "name" : filename, "size" : st.st_size , 
        "url" : url_for('show', filename=filename)} ]
#then do this
    return Response(json.dumps(js),  mimetype='application/json')

jsonify prevents you from doing this in Flask 0.10 and lower for security reasons.

To do it anyway, just use json.dumps in the Python standard library.

http://docs.python.org/library/json.html#json.dumps

This is working for me. Which version of Flask are you using?

from flask import jsonify

...

@app.route('/test/json')
def test_json():
    list = [
            {'a': 1, 'b': 2},
            {'a': 5, 'b': 10}
           ]
    return jsonify(results = list)

Flask's jsonify() method now serializes top-level arrays as of this commit, available in Flask 0.11 onwards.

For convenience, you can either pass in a Python list: jsonify([1,2,3]) Or pass in a series of args: jsonify(1,2,3)

Both will be serialized to a JSON top-level array: [1,2,3]

Details here: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/dev/api/#flask.json.jsonify

Solved, no fuss. You can be lazy and use jsonify, all you need to do is pass in items=[your list].

Take a look here for the solution

https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/issues/510

A list in a flask can be easily jsonify using jsonify like:

from flask import Flask,jsonify
app = Flask(__name__)

tasks = [
    {
        'id':1,
        'task':'this is first task'
    },
    {
        'id':2,
        'task':'this is another task'
    }
]

@app.route('/app-name/api/v0.1/tasks',methods=['GET'])
def get_tasks():
    return jsonify({'tasks':tasks})  #will return the json

if(__name__ == '__main__'):
    app.run(debug = True)

josonify works... But if you intend to just pass an array without the 'results' key, you can use JSON library from python. The following conversion works for me.

import json

@app.route('/test/json')
def test_json():
    mylist = [
        {'a': 1, 'b': 2},
        {'a': 5, 'b': 10}
        ]
    return json.dumps(mylist)

If you are searching literally the way to return a JSON list in flask and you are completly sure that your variable is a list then the easy way is (where bin is a list of 1's and 0's):

   return jsonify({'ans':bin}), 201

Finally, in your client you will obtain something like

{ "ans": [ 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0 ] }