What does it mean for an object to be picklable (or pickle-able)?

python pickle
Paul picture Paul · Aug 30, 2010 · Viewed 31.8k times · Source

Python docs mention this word a lot and I want to know what it means! Googling doesn't help much..

Answer

Matthew Flaschen picture Matthew Flaschen · Aug 30, 2010

It simply means it can be serialized by the pickle module. For a basic explanation of this, see What can be pickled and unpickled?. The pickle protocol provides more details, and shows how classes can customize the process.

Related questions

How can I use pickle to save a dict?

I have looked through the information that the Python docs give, but I'm still a little confused. Could somebody post sample code that would write a new file then use pickle to dump a dictionary into it?

Read More
Saving and loading objects and using pickle

I´m trying to save and load objects using pickle module. First I declare my objects: >>> class Fruits:pass ... >>> banana = Fruits() >>> banana.color = 'yellow' >>> banana.value = 30 After that …

Read More
Serializing class instance to JSON

I am trying to create a JSON string representation of a class instance and having difficulty. Let's say the class is built like this: class testclass: value1 = "a" value2 = "b" A call to the json.dumps is made like this: …

Read More