How to convert a string to BSON?

Question

I have a string like this:

document = '{ time : 14/09/19 16:00:00,
   global : { full:190 , defects: 7 , btp: 6 , total: 202 } ,
   domains : [ { domain : "A" , full:7 , defects: 2 , btp: 0 , total: 9 },
               { domain : "B" , full:0 , defects: 0 , btp: 0 , total: 0 },
               { domain : "C" , full:6 , defects: 0 , btp: 0 , total: 6 },
               { domain : "D" , full:26 , defects: 0 , btp: 2 , total: 28 },
               { domain : "E" , full:0 , defects: 0 , btp: 0 , total: 0 },
               { domain : "F" , full:4 , defects: 0 , btp: 2 , total: 6 },
               { domain : "G" , full:0 , defects: 0 , btp: 0 , total: 0 },
               { domain : "H" , full:21 , defects: 0 , btp: 1 , total: 22 },
               { domain : "I" , full:32 , defects: 0 , btp: 0 , total: 32 },
               ] }'

When I try to insert this into a mongoDB collection, I get the following error:

TypeError: 'str' object does not support item assignment

I am clueless about how to convert a string to BSON, in order to execute the insert with it.

I looked in the bson_util module, but no luck.

Answer 1

It's not the BSON part that matters here. The MongoDB driver will take care of that. Your job is convert JSON to a valid python data structure:

import json

data = json.loads(document)

collection.insert(data);

Answer 2

You rarely have to deal with BSON directly yourself. This is just the format that mongo uses to represent the data internally.

As a user of the database or one of it's clients, you only need to deal with key:value type objects we talk about as documents. In python, key:value like objects are most commonly dict objects; A dictionary. You'll need to convert that string into an actual dict-like-object before inserting it into mongo.

One example of this would be to use the json module:

>>> import json
>>> document = json.loads('{ time : 14/09/19 16:00:00...')

You can now have the document object inserted into your collection.