DataFrame.to_json() creates invalid JSON with MultiIndex

[mathom]

Pandas will dump MultiIndex dataframes as invalid JSON in 0.16.0. For example this dataframe:

     0
a c  1
b d  2

Will dump as: {"0":{"["a","c"]":1,"["b","d"]":2}}. You can see that the keys aren't escaping their double quote character and this isn't readable as JSON.

The following snippet illustrates how to recreate this:

import pandas
df = pandas.DataFrame([1,2], index=[['a','b'],['c','d']])
pandas.read_json(df.to_json())

...

ValueError: No ':' found when decoding object value

My pandas versions:

pandas.show_versions()

INSTALLED VERSIONS
------------------
commit: None
python: 2.7.6.final.0
python-bits: 64
OS: Darwin
OS-release: 14.3.0
machine: x86_64
processor: i386
byteorder: little
LC_ALL: None
LANG: en_US.UTF-8

pandas: 0.16.0
nose: 1.3.6
Cython: None
numpy: 1.9.2
scipy: None
statsmodels: None
IPython: 3.1.0
sphinx: None
patsy: None
dateutil: 2.4.2
pytz: 2013b
bottleneck: None
tables: None
numexpr: None
matplotlib: 1.4.3
openpyxl: None
xlrd: None
xlwt: 1.0.0
xlsxwriter: 0.5.5
lxml: None
bs4: 4.3.2
html5lib: 0.999
httplib2: 0.9.1
apiclient: 1.4.0
sqlalchemy: 0.9.3
pymysql: None
psycopg2: None

[jreback]

this is a dupe of #4889

this is Not Implemented, however, doing: df.reset_index().to_json() will work.