Lightweight pickle for basic types in python?

Question

All I want to do is serialize and unserialize tuples of strings or ints.

I looked at pickle.dumps() but the byte overhead is significant. Basically it looks like it takes up about 4x as much space as it needs to. Besides, all I need is basic types and have no need to serialize objects.

marshal is a little better in terms of space but the result is full of nasty \x00 bytes. Ideally I would like the result to be human readable.

I thought of just using repr() and eval(), but is there a simple way I could accomplish this without using eval()?

This is getting stored in a db, not a file. Byte overhead matters because it could make the difference between requiring a TEXT column versus a varchar, and generally data compactness affects all areas of db performance.

Answer 1

Take a look at json, at least the generated dumps are readable with many other languages.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) http://json.org is a subset of JavaScript syntax (ECMA-262 3rd edition) used as a lightweight data interchange format.