Pandas TypeError when serializing series.tolist() to JSON

The json library, encoder module, raises a TypeError exception, which I think should not be raised. Hence I think the Series.tolist() method may be at fault here and not json standard library.

import pandas as pd
import json
s = pd.Series([1, 2, 3])
json.dumps(s.tolist())

Gives:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/json/__init__.py", line 230, in dumps
    return _default_encoder.encode(obj)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/json/encoder.py", line 192, in encode
    chunks = self.iterencode(o, _one_shot=True)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/json/encoder.py", line 250, in iterencode
    return _iterencode(o, 0)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/json/encoder.py", line 173, in default
    raise TypeError(repr(o) + " is not JSON serializable")
TypeError: 1 is not JSON serializable

But

import pandas as pd
import json
s = pd.Series([1, 2, 3])
json.dumps(s.values.tolist())

Works:

'[1, 2, 3]'

I am aware of Series.to_json() method, but I need to insert the values first into a nested dictionary which is only later serialized to JSON. That is how I came across this behaviour.

Output of `pd.show_versions()`

INSTALLED VERSIONS
------------------
commit: None
python: 3.4.4.final.0
python-bits: 64
OS: Linux
OS-release: 3.2.0-4-amd64
machine: x86_64
processor: 
byteorder: little
LC_ALL: None
LANG: en_US.UTF-8

pandas: 0.18.0
nose: None
pip: 8.1.2
setuptools: 20.6.7
Cython: 0.24
numpy: 1.11.0
scipy: 0.18.0
statsmodels: None
xarray: None
IPython: None
sphinx: None
patsy: None
dateutil: 2.5.3
pytz: 2015.7
blosc: None
bottleneck: None
tables: None
numexpr: None
matplotlib: 1.5.1
openpyxl: None
xlrd: None
xlwt: None
xlsxwriter: None
lxml: None
bs4: 4.5.1
html5lib: 0.999
httplib2: 0.9.2
apiclient: None
sqlalchemy: None
pymysql: None
psycopg2: 2.6.1 (dt dec pq3 ext lo64)
jinja2: None
boto: None

Comment From: TomAugspurger

Can you try on the latest version of pandas? Your code works for me, and I think it was fixed by https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/pull/13050

Comment From: jreback

In [15]: import pandas as pd
    ...: import json
    ...: s = pd.Series([1, 2, 3])
    ...: json.dumps(s.tolist())
    ...: 
Out[15]: '[1, 2, 3]'

In [16]: pd.__version__
Out[16]: '0.19.0'

Comment From: Dmitrii-I

I have upgraded pandas from 0.18.1 to 0.19.0, and now it indeed works. Thank you!

Pandas TypeError when serializing series.tolist() to JSON

Output of pd.show_versions()

Output of `pd.show_versions()`