How to compare two JSON objects with the same elements in a different order equal

0 votes

How can I test whether two JSON objects are equal in python, disregarding the order of lists?

For example:

JSON document a:

{
    "errors": [
        {"error": "invalid", "field": "email"},
        {"error": "required", "field": "name"}
    ],
    "success": false
}

JSON document b:

{
    "success": false,
    "errors": [
        {"error": "required", "field": "name"},
        {"error": "invalid", "field": "email"}
    ]
}

a and b should compare equal, even though the order of the "errors" lists are different.

Aug 7, 2020 in Python by kartik
• 37,520 points
9,652 views

1 answer to this question.

0 votes

Hello @kartik,

If you want two objects with the same elements, but in a different order to compare equal, then the obvious thing to do is compare sorted copies of them - for instance, for the dictionaries represented by your JSON strings a and b:

import json

a = json.loads("""
{
    "errors": [
        {"error": "invalid", "field": "email"},
        {"error": "required", "field": "name"}
    ],
    "success": false
}
""")

b = json.loads("""
{
    "success": false,
    "errors": [
        {"error": "required", "field": "name"},
        {"error": "invalid", "field": "email"}
    ]
}
""")
>>> sorted(a.items()) == sorted(b.items())
False

 but that doesn't work, because in each case, the "errors" item of the top-level dict is a list with the same elements in a different order, and sorted() doesn't try to sort anything except the "top" level of an iterable.

To fix that, we can define an ordered function which will recursively sort any lists it finds (and convert dictionaries to lists of (key, value) pairs so that they're orderable):

def ordered(obj):
    if isinstance(obj, dict):
        return sorted((k, ordered(v)) for k, v in obj.items())
    if isinstance(obj, list):
        return sorted(ordered(x) for x in obj)
    else:
        return obj

If we apply this function to a and b, the results compare equal:

>>> ordered(a) == ordered(b)
True

Hope this helps!!

Thank You!

answered Aug 7, 2020 by Niroj
• 82,880 points

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