Try this:
import pickle
a = {‘hello’: ‘world’}
with open(‘filename.pickle’, ‘wb’) as handle:
pickle.dump(a, handle, protocol=pickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL)
with open(‘filename.pickle’, ‘rb’) as handle:
b = pickle.load(handle)
print a == b
import pickle
your_data = {‘foo’: ‘bar’}
# Store data (serialize)
with open(‘filename.pickle’, ‘wb’) as handle:
pickle.dump(your_data, handle, protocol=pickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL)
# Load data (deserialize)
with open(‘filename.pickle’, ‘rb’) as handle:
unserialized_data = pickle.load(handle)
print(your_data == unserialized_data)
The advantage of HIGHEST_PROTOCOL is that files get smaller. This makes unpickling sometimes much faster.
Important notice: The maximum file size of pickle is about 2GB.
Alternative way
import mpu
your_data = {‘foo’: ‘bar’}
mpu.io.write(‘filename.pickle’, data)
unserialized_data = mpu.io.read(‘filename.pickle’)
Alternative Formats
CSV: Super simple format (read & write)
JSON: Nice for writing human-readable data; VERY commonly used (read & write)
YAML: YAML is a superset of JSON, but easier to read (read & write, comparison of JSON and YAML)
pickle: A Python serialization format (read & write)
MessagePack (Python package): More compact representation (read & write)
HDF5 (Python package): Nice for matrices (read & write)
XML: exists too *sigh* (read & write)
For your application, the following might be important:
Support by other programming languages
Reading / writing performance
Compactness (file size)
See also: Comparison of data serialization formats
In case you are rather looking for a way to make configuration files, you might want to read my short article Configuration files in Python