Parsing Suds SOAP complex data type into Python dict

There is a class method called dict in suds.client.Client class which takes a sudsobject as input and returns a Python dict as output. Check it out here: Official Suds Documentation

The resulting snippet becomes as elegant as this:

from suds.client import Client

# Code to obtain your suds_object here...

required_dict = Client.dict(suds_object)

You might also want to check out items class method (link) in the same class which extracts items from suds_object similar to items method on dict.

You can cast the object to dict(), but you still get the complex data type used by suds. So here are some helpful functions that I wrote just for the occasion:

def basic_sobject_to_dict(obj):
    """Converts suds object to dict very quickly.
    Does not serialize date time or normalize key case.
    :param obj: suds object
    :return: dict object
    """
    if not hasattr(obj, '__keylist__'):
        return obj
    data = {}
    fields = obj.__keylist__
    for field in fields:
        val = getattr(obj, field)
        if isinstance(val, list):
            data[field] = []
            for item in val:
                data[field].append(basic_sobject_to_dict(item))
        else:
            data[field] = basic_sobject_to_dict(val)
    return data


def sobject_to_dict(obj, key_to_lower=False, json_serialize=False):
    """
    Converts a suds object to a dict.
    :param json_serialize: If set, changes date and time types to iso string.
    :param key_to_lower: If set, changes index key name to lower case.
    :param obj: suds object
    :return: dict object
    """
    import datetime

    if not hasattr(obj, '__keylist__'):
        if json_serialize and isinstance(obj, (datetime.datetime, datetime.time, datetime.date)):
            return obj.isoformat()
        else:
            return obj
    data = {}
    fields = obj.__keylist__
    for field in fields:
        val = getattr(obj, field)
        if key_to_lower:
            field = field.lower()
        if isinstance(val, list):
            data[field] = []
            for item in val:
                data[field].append(sobject_to_dict(item, json_serialize=json_serialize))
        elif isinstance(val, (datetime.datetime, datetime.time, datetime.date)):
            data[field] = val.isoformat()
        else:
            data[field] = sobject_to_dict(val, json_serialize=json_serialize)
    return data


def sobject_to_json(obj, key_to_lower=False):
    """
    Converts a suds object to json.
    :param obj: suds object
    :param key_to_lower: If set, changes index key name to lower case.
    :return: json object
    """
    import json
    data = sobject_to_dict(obj, key_to_lower=key_to_lower, json_serialize=True)
    return json.dumps(data)

If there is an easier way, I would love to hear about it.

Found one solution:

from suds.sudsobject import asdict

def recursive_asdict(d):
    """Convert Suds object into serializable format."""
    out = {}
    for k, v in asdict(d).iteritems():
        if hasattr(v, '__keylist__'):
            out[k] = recursive_asdict(v)
        elif isinstance(v, list):
            out[k] = []
            for item in v:
                if hasattr(item, '__keylist__'):
                    out[k].append(recursive_asdict(item))
                else:
                    out[k].append(item)
        else:
            out[k] = v
    return out

def suds_to_json(data):
    return json.dumps(recursive_asdict(data))

If subs are just nested dict and list, it should work.