Elegant way to store dictionary permanently with Python?

Question

Currently expensively parsing a file, which generates a dictionary of ~400 key, value pairs, which is seldomly updated. Previously had a function which parsed the file, wrote it to a text file in dictionary syntax (ie. dict = {'Adam': 'Room 430', 'Bob': 'Room 404'}) etc, and copied and pasted it into another function whose sole purpose was to return that parsed dictionary.

Hence, in every file where I would use that dictionary, I would import that function, and assign it to a variable, which is now that dictionary. Wondering if there's a more elegant way to do this, which does not involve explicitly copying and pasting code around? Using a database kind of seems unnecessary, and the text file gave me the benefit of seeing whether the parsing was done correctly before adding it to the function. But I'm open to suggestions.

Answer 1

Why not dump it to a JSON file, and then load it from there where you need it?

import json  with open('my_dict.json', 'w') as f:     json.dump(my_dict, f)  # elsewhere...  with open('my_dict.json') as f:     my_dict = json.load(f) 

Loading from JSON is fairly efficient.

Another option would be to use pickle, but unlike JSON, the files it generates aren't human-readable so you lose out on the visual verification you liked from your old method.