Inconsistent JSON output when serializing enums in Rust

Question

I'm using serde_json to serialize an enum to JSON. This is what I'm getting when serializing std::net::IpAddr:

use std::net::IpAddr;

fn main() {
    let addr : IpAddr = "127.0.0.1".parse().unwrap();
    let json = serde_json::to_string(&addr).unwrap();
    println!("{}", json);
}

output:

"127.0.0.1"

However, when I write my own similar enum and serialize it, it looks different:

use serde::{Deserialize, Serialize};

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
enum Foo {
    One(String),
    Two(String),
}

fn main() {
    let foo = Foo::One("one".to_string());
    let json = serde_json::to_string(&foo).unwrap();
    println!("{}", json);
}

output:

{"One":"one"}

Why does the first snippet write a JSON string while the second one writes a JSON object?

cafce25 · Accepted Answer · 2023-08-19 17:21:33Z

3

That's because the impl Serialize for IpAddr isn't derived but written like this:

impl Serialize for net::IpAddr {
    fn serialize<S>(&self, serializer: S) -> Result<S::Ok, S::Error>
    where
        S: Serializer,
    {
        if serializer.is_human_readable() {
            match *self {
                net::IpAddr::V4(ref a) => a.serialize(serializer),
                net::IpAddr::V6(ref a) => a.serialize(serializer),
            }
        } else {
            match *self {
                net::IpAddr::V4(ref a) => {
                    serializer.serialize_newtype_variant("IpAddr", 0, "V4", a)
                }
                net::IpAddr::V6(ref a) => {
                    serializer.serialize_newtype_variant("IpAddr", 1, "V6", a)
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Note especially the is_human_readable() branch where it just delegates to the Serialize implementations of the respective inner types and doesn't add anything for the variant.

answered Aug 19, 2023 at 17:21

cafce25

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2 Comments

Shmoopy Over a year ago

ah, I was looking for this but my brain told me I should be looking around IpAddr implementation not serde

cafce25 Over a year ago

Well std can't really use the downstream crates to implement their traits, so it's really up to the crates that define a trait to implement it for anything applicable in std

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