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tomlkit does not serialize some empty arrays and dictionaries

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
58/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
python
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start by running the provided Python reproduction through tomlkit.loads and tomlkit.dumps, then trace the serialization path used for empty dictionaries and arrays. Done means the resulting TOML preserves those empty structures rather than producing only two newlines; the issue does not name a file or test to run.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import tomlkit


doc = tomlkit.loads("""
x.y.z = 1

[[a]]
x = 1
""")

doc["a"].pop()
doc["x"]["y"].pop("z")

print(f"{doc=}")

rendered = tomlkit.dumps(doc)
print(f"{rendered=}")

result

doc={'x': {'y': {}}, 'a': []}
rendered='\n\n'

Two newlines is not a good TOML representation of that dictionary

Dominant language
Python
Stars
850
Forks
163
Avg merge
13m
Merged PRs (30d)
2

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