Convert bson to json in python/pymongo

Question

I'm trying to convert bson data gotten straight from pymongo into json data. Is there a straight forward way to do this with python using pymongo or something else?

Here's the code if it helps:

def email_main(request):
    collection = get_collection("nimbus").fullcontact_email_data
    if request.method == "POST":
        data = collection.save(dict(request.POST.iterlists()))
        response = HttpResponse(data, content_type="application/json")
    elif request.method == "GET":
        getParams = convertQuerydictToDict(request.GET)
        page, itemsPerPage = getPageDataFromDict(getParams)
        getParamsWithNoPageData = createDictWithoutPageData(getParams)
        data = collection.find(getParamsWithNoPageData)[page:page+itemsPerPage+1]
        response = HttpResponse(data, content_type="application/json")
    else:
        response = HttpResponse(status=404)
    return response


def convertQuerydictToDict(queryDict):
    return dict(queryDict.iterlists())


def getPageDataFromDict(myDict):
    if "page" in myDict and "itemsPerPage" in myDict:
        page, itemsPerPage = myDict["page"], myDict['itemsPerPage']
    elif "page" in myDict:
        page, itemsPerPage = myDict["page"], 10
    else:
        page, itemsPerPage = 0, 10
    return page, itemsPerPage

def createDictWithoutPageData(myDict):
    newDict = deepcopy(myDict)
    newDict.pop("page", None)
    newDict.pop("itemsPerPage", None)
    return newDict

basically that data variable needs to get turned into proper json. There must be some built in thing that does this.

For clarity here's what I get when I put data into the python console:

>>> data
<pymongo.cursor.Cursor object at 0x4dd0f50>
>>> data[0]
{u'blah': u'go', u'_id': ObjectId('540e3fd8bb6933764d5650b7')}

ObjectId is not part of the json spec...

Solution

As discussed in the comments above, it appears that the best approach is to use PyMongo's json_util module to handle the gory details of converting BSON to JSON.