Question

How do I serialize a Python dictionary into a string, and then back to a dictionary? The dictionary will have lists and other dictionaries inside it.

Answer 1

It depends on what you’re wanting to use it for. If you’re just trying to save it, you should use pickle (or, if you’re using CPython 2.x, cPickle, which is faster).

>>> import pickle
>>> pickle.dumps({'foo': 'bar'})
b'\x80\x03}q\x00X\x03\x00\x00\x00fooq\x01X\x03\x00\x00\x00barq\x02s.'
>>> pickle.loads(_)
{'foo': 'bar'}

If you want it to be readable, you could use json:

>>> import json
>>> json.dumps({'foo': 'bar'})
'{"foo": "bar"}'
>>> json.loads(_)
{'foo': 'bar'}

json is, however, very limited in what it will support, while pickle can be used for arbitrary objects (if it doesn’t work automatically, the class can define __getstate__ to specify precisely how it should be pickled).

>>> pickle.dumps(object())
b'\x80\x03cbuiltins\nobject\nq\x00)\x81q\x01.'
>>> json.dumps(object())
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
TypeError: <object object at 0x7fa0348230c0> is not JSON serializable