Question

I have a problem writing a file with Pickle in Python

Here is my code:

test = "TEST"
f1 = open(path+filename, "wb", 0)
pickle.dump(test,f1,0)
f1.close()
return

This gives me the output in the .txt file as VTESTp0. I’m not sure why this is?
Shouldn’t it just have been saved as TEST?

I’m very new to pickle and I didn’t even know it existed until today so sorry if I’m asking a silly question.

Answer 1

No, pickle does not write strings just as strings. Pickle is a serialization protocol, it turns objects into strings of bytes so that you can later recreate them. The actual format depends on which version of the protocol you use, but you should really treat pickle data as an opaque type.

If you want to write the string "TEST" to the file, just write the string itself. Don’t bother with pickle.