sort_keys arg

A sort_keys would be nice.

I know I can implement it myself with a few lines of code, but that doesn’t work from a logging config file.

[dclar43]

I’d like this feature as well and I’m kind of confused why this was closed.

@tuukkamustonen said that OrderedDict wouldn’t need to be used because passing sort_keys=True to json.dumps handles the sorting.

Then @offero said

Yes, use sort_keys. Making a new OrderedDict for each log output would be a large overhead.

and closed it. Which doesn’t really make sense to me. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something.

As far as I can tell the only way we can effectively call json.dumps with sort_keys=True is to pass our own json_serializer to JsonFormatter.

Some brief profiling:

Test data is from a JSON file containing 8000 randomly generated entries(generated using https://www.json-generator.com) into a dict.

I ran both json.dumps(data) and json.dumps(data, sort_keys=True) 100 times.

The former spent a total time of 14,554ms in iterencode while the ladder spent 16,580ms in iterencode.

So on average not sorting took 145.54ms and sorting took 165.8ms resulting in a 20.26ms difference between the two.

These numbers are from Python 3.7 but Python 3.5 showed similar results.

[dckc]

I don’t understand. How do you recommend I use sort_keys from a logging config file? I don’t see any way to do that.