Preserve Python tuples with JSON

Nope, it's not possible. There is no concept of a tuple in the JSON format (see here for a concise breakdown of what types exist in JSON). Python's json module converts Python tuples to JSON lists because that's the closest thing in JSON to a tuple.

You haven't given much detail of your use case here, but if you need to store string representations of data structures that include tuples, a few possibilities immediately come to mind, which may or may not be appropriate depending upon your situation:

1. Create your own encoding and decoding functions
2. Use pickle (careful; pickle.loads isn't safe to use on user-provided input).
3. Use repr and ast.literal_eval instead of json.dumps and json.loads. repr will give you output reasonably similar in appearance to json.dumps, but repr will not convert tuples to lists. ast.literal_eval is a less powerful, more secure version of eval which will only decode strings, numbers, tuples, lists, dicts, booleans, and None.

Option 3 is probably the easiest and simplest solution for you.

It is with simplejson

import simplejson

def _to_json(python_object) :
    if isinstance(python_object, tuple) :
        python_object = {'__class__': 'tuple',
                         '__value__': list(python_object)}
    else :
        raise TypeError(repr(python_object) + ' is not JSON serializable') 

    return python_object

def _from_json(json_object):                                   
    if json_object['__class__'] == 'tuple':
        return tuple(json_object['__value__'])
    return json_object


jsn = simplejson.dumps((1,2,3), 
                       default=_to_json, 
                       tuple_as_array=False)

tpl = simplejson.loads(jsn, object_hook=_from_json)

You can write a highly-specialzed encoder and a decoder hook:

import json

class MultiDimensionalArrayEncoder(json.JSONEncoder):
    def encode(self, obj):
        def hint_tuples(item):
            if isinstance(item, tuple):
                return {'__tuple__': True, 'items': item}
            if isinstance(item, list):
                return [hint_tuples(e) for e in item]
            if isinstance(item, dict):
                return {key: hint_tuples(value) for key, value in item.items()}
            else:
                return item

        return super(MultiDimensionalArrayEncoder, self).encode(hint_tuples(obj))

def hinted_tuple_hook(obj):
    if '__tuple__' in obj:
        return tuple(obj['items'])
    else:
        return obj


enc = MultiDimensionalArrayEncoder()
jsonstring =  enc.encode([1, 2, (3, 4), [5, 6, (7, 8)]])

print jsonstring

# [1, 2, {"items": [3, 4], "__tuple__": true}, [5, 6, {"items": [7, 8], "__tuple__": true}]]

print json.loads(jsonstring, object_hook=hinted_tuple_hook)

# [1, 2, (3, 4), [5, 6, (7, 8)]]

The principal difference between python lists and tuples is mutability, which is irrelevant to JSON representations, as long as you're not contemplating modifying the internal members of the JSON list while it's in text form. You can just turn the lists you get back into tuples. If you're not using any custom object decoders, the only structured datatypes you have to consider are JSON objects and arrays, which come out as python dicts and lists.

def tuplify(listything):
    if isinstance(listything, list): return tuple(map(tuplify, listything))
    if isinstance(listything, dict): return {k:tuplify(v) for k,v in listything.items()}
    return listything

If you are specializing the decoding, or want some JSON arrays to be python lists and others to be python tuples, you'll need to wrap data items in a dict or tuple that annotates type information. This in itself is a better way to influence an algorithm's control flow than branching based on whether something is a list or tuple (or some other iterable type).