PyMongo and Flask's Jsonify contains escape slashes

Question

I'm trying to make a response using Flask from a Mongodb collection:

@app.route('/stories', methods = ['GET'])
def get_stories():
    stories = db.stories.find()

    json_docs = [json.dumps(doc, default=json_util.default) for doc in stories]

    resp = jsonify(data=json_docs)
    resp.status_code = 200

    return make_response(resp)

This gets all the items and encodes it into a JSON response, but it looks like this:

{
"data": [
   "{\"content\": \"some story here\", \"_id\": {\"$oid\": \"5293c34431e20307544db9cb\"}}", 
   "{\"content\": \"some story here\", \"_id\": {\"$oid\": \"5293c34d31e20307584c3e6e\"}}", 
   "{\"content\": \"some story here\", \"_id\": {\"$oid\": \"5293c57d31e20307a7b40abe\"}}"
   ]
}

Is there a way to encode this using single quotes so it doesn't add in the escape strings? Or is there something I'm overlooking

Answer 1

You are encoding twice:

json_docs = [json.dumps(doc, default=json_util.default) for doc in stories]

resp = jsonify(data=json_docs)

Now each entry in json_docs is a string representing a JSON object.

Remove the json.dumps() call:

resp = jsonify(data=stories)

or use flask.json.dump() with a Response():

resp = Response(json.dumps({'data': stories}, default=json_util.default),
                mimetype='application/json')

This lets you use your json_util.default handler on the cursor objects still.