The pickle module implements a fundamental, but powerful algorithm for serializing and de-serializing a Python object structure. Pickling - is the process whereby a Python object hierarchy is converted into a byte stream, and Unpickling - is the inverse operation, whereby a byte stream is converted back into an object hierarchy. Pickling (and unpickling) is alternatively known as serialization ...
However, there's a package called klepto that abstracts the saving of objects to a dictionary interface, so you can choose to pickle objects and save them to a file (as shown below), or pickle the objects and save them to a database, or instead of use pickle use json, or many other options.
Pickle is unsafe because it constructs arbitrary Python objects by invoking arbitrary functions. However, this is also gives it the power to serialize almost any Python object, without any boilerplate or even white-/black-listing (in the common case).
I have looked through the information that the Python documentation for pickle gives, but I'm still a little confused. What would be some sample code that would write a new file and then use pickle...
How can I use pickle to save a dict (or any other Python object)?
The following is an example of how you might write and read a pickle file. Note that if you keep appending pickle data to the file, you will need to continue reading from the file until you find what you want or an exception is generated by reaching the end of the file. That is what the last function does.
From the pickle.py source code: ... and from the pickle module documentation: The pickle module has an transparent optimizer (_pickle) written in C. It is used whenever available. Otherwise the pure Python implementation is used. In Python 2, _pickle was known as cPickle, but has been updated to allow the transparent use as an implementation ...