Dump a list in a pickle file and retrieve it back later

Question

I'm trying to save a list of strings, so that it can be accessed later. How can it be achieved using pickle? An illustrative example could help.

Answer 1

Pickling will serialize your list (convert it, and it's entries to a unique byte string), so you can save it to disk. You can also use pickle to retrieve your original list, loading from the saved file.

So, first build a list, then use pickle.dump to send it to a file...

Python 3.4.1 (default, May 21 2014, 12:39:51) 
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 5.0 (clang-500.2.79)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> mylist = ['I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.', "Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?", "I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!", "No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting."]
>>> 
>>> import pickle
>>> 
>>> with open('parrot.pkl', 'wb') as f:
...   pickle.dump(mylist, f)
... 
>>> 

Then quit and come back later… and open with pickle.load...

Python 3.4.1 (default, May 21 2014, 12:39:51) 
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 5.0 (clang-500.2.79)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pickle
>>> with open('parrot.pkl', 'rb') as f:
...   mynewlist = pickle.load(f)
... 
>>> mynewlist
['I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.', "Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?", "I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!", "No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting."]
>>>