Question

I’m programming a complex tree structure in Python and I’m tired of creating tree objects and filling them with data everytime I run the code.

So, is there a way to make your objects “durable” in Python. With “durable” I mean if there is a way to save all my objects as bytes in a file, so when I run the code again, I can create and fill all my objects with the data in the byte-file, restoring the state I left the last time I ran the code.

I guess there may be a post with this same question, but I can’t think of a better term for “durable” in english.

Answer 1

You can use the pickle module to serialize your data (which is the general phrase for turning your in-memory representation into something that can be written to disk). You read more in the Python documentation.

The simplest code looks like this to store your object in a file:

pickle.dump(myobject, open('myfile', 'w'))

And to read it back in:

myobject = pickle.load(open('myfile', 'r'))