how to serialize arbitrary file types to json string in python

Question

My server is going to be sending a JSON, serialized as a string, through a socket to another client machine. I'll take my final json and do this:

import json
python_dict_obj = { "id" : 1001, "name" : "something", "file" : <???> }
serialized_json_str = json.dumps(python_dict_obj)

I'd like to have one of the fields in my JSON have the value that is a file, encoded as a string.

Performance-wise (but also interoperability-wise) what is the best way to encode a file using python? Base64? Binary? Just the raw string text?

EDIT - For those suggestion base64, something like this?

# get file
import base64
import json

with open(filename, 'r') as f:
    filecontents = f.read()
encoded = base64.b64encode(filecontents)
python_dict_obj['file'] = encoded
serialized_json_str = json.dumps(python_dict_obj)

# ... sent to client via socket

# decrpyting
json_again = json.loads(serialized)
filecontents_again = base64.b64decode(json_again['file'])

Answer 1

I'd use base64. JSON isn't designed to communicate binary data. So unless your file's content is vanilla text, it "should be" encoded to use vanilla text. Virtually everything can encode and decode base64. If you instead use (for example) Python's repr(file_content), that also produces "plain text", but the receiving end would need to know how to decode the string escapes Python's repr() uses.