Here's a fairly complete solution for recursively encoding and decoding datetime.datetime and datetime.date objects using the standard library json module. This needs Python >= 2.6 since the %f format code in the datetime.datetime.strptime() format string is only supported in since then. For Python 2.5 support, drop the %f and strip the microseconds from the ISO 8601 date string before trying to convert it, but you'll lose microseconds precision, of course. For interoperability with ISO 8601 date strings from other sources, which may include a time zone name or UTC offset, you may also need to strip some parts of the date string before the conversion. For a complete parser for ISO 8601 date strings (and many other date formats) see the third-party dateutil module.

Decoding only works when the ISO 8601 date strings are values in a JavaScript literal object notation or in nested structures within an object. ISO 8601 date strings, which are items of a top-level array will not be decoded.

I.e. this works:

date = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> json = dumps(dict(foo='bar', innerdict=dict(date=date)))
>>> json
'{"innerdict": {"date": "2010-07-15T13:16:38.365579"}, "foo": "bar"}'
>>> loads(json)
{u'innerdict': {u'date': datetime.datetime(2010, 7, 15, 13, 16, 38, 365579)},
u'foo': u'bar'}

And this too:

>>> json = dumps(['foo', 'bar', dict(date=date)])
>>> json
'["foo", "bar", {"date": "2010-07-15T13:16:38.365579"}]'
>>> loads(json)
[u'foo', u'bar', {u'date': datetime.datetime(2010, 7, 15, 13, 16, 38, 365579)}]

But this doesn't work as expected:

>>> json = dumps(['foo', 'bar', date])
>>> json
'["foo", "bar", "2010-07-15T13:16:38.365579"]'
>>> loads(json)
[u'foo', u'bar', u'2010-07-15T13:16:38.365579']

Here's the code:

__all__ = ['dumps', 'loads']

import datetime

try:
    import json
except ImportError:
    import simplejson as json

class JSONDateTimeEncoder(json.JSONEncoder):
    def default(self, obj):
        if isinstance(obj, (datetime.date, datetime.datetime)):
            return obj.isoformat()
        else:
            return json.JSONEncoder.default(self, obj)

def datetime_decoder(d):
    if isinstance(d, list):
        pairs = enumerate(d)
    elif isinstance(d, dict):
        pairs = d.items()
    result = []
    for k,v in pairs:
        if isinstance(v, basestring):
            try:
                # The %f format code is only supported in Python >= 2.6.
                # For Python <= 2.5 strip off microseconds
                # v = datetime.datetime.strptime(v.rsplit('.', 1)[0],
                #     '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S')
                v = datetime.datetime.strptime(v, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f')
            except ValueError:
                try:
                    v = datetime.datetime.strptime(v, '%Y-%m-%d').date()
                except ValueError:
                    pass
        elif isinstance(v, (dict, list)):
            v = datetime_decoder(v)
        result.append((k, v))
    if isinstance(d, list):
        return [x[1] for x in result]
    elif isinstance(d, dict):
        return dict(result)

def dumps(obj):
    return json.dumps(obj, cls=JSONDateTimeEncoder)

def loads(obj):
    return json.loads(obj, object_hook=datetime_decoder)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    mytimestamp = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
    mydate = datetime.date.today()
    data = dict(
        foo = 42,
        bar = [mytimestamp, mydate],
        date = mydate,
        timestamp = mytimestamp,
        struct = dict(
            date2 = mydate,
            timestamp2 = mytimestamp
        )
    )

    print repr(data)
    jsonstring = dumps(data)
    print jsonstring
    print repr(loads(jsonstring))