Question

I am working on a project built on python 2.4 (It is an embedded python project, so I don’t have a choice on the version of python used). Throughout the application, we use array.array to store data.

Support for pickling array.array objects was added to pickle (and cPickle) in 2.5. We have a viable workaround in 2.4 when using the pure python pickle class (we subclass Pickler/Unpickler to handle arrays) but this does not work with cPickle (we need this due to performance problems).

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can use the standard library module copy_reg to register functions to deal with pickling instances of types that don’t natively support pickling; cPickle will use your registered functions where needed. I’d apply exactly this “hook” approach to your requirement of pickling instances of array.array.