Python: How do I write a list to file and then pull it back into memory (dict represented as a string convert to dict) later?

Question

Why not use python pickle? Python has a great serializing module called pickle it is very easy to use.

import cPickle
cPickle.dump(obj, open('save.p', 'wb')) 
obj = cPickle.load(open('save.p', 'rb'))

There are two disadvantages with pickle:

• It's not secure against erroneous or maliciously constructed data. Never unpickle data received from an untrusted or unauthenticated source.
• The format is not human readable.

If you are using python 2.6 there is a builtin module called json. It is as easy as pickle to use:

import json
encoded = json.dumps(obj)
obj = json.loads(encoded)

Json format is human readable and is very similar to the dictionary string representation in python. And doesn't have any security issues like pickle. But might be slower than cPickle.

I'd use shelve, json, yaml, or whatever, as suggested by other answers.

shelve is specially cool because you can have the dict on disk and still use it. Values will be loaded on-demand.

But if you really want to parse the text of the dict, and it contains only strings, ints and tuples like you've shown, you can use ast.literal_eval to parse it. It is a lot safer, since you can't eval full expressions with it - It only works with strings, numbers, tuples, lists, dicts, booleans, and None:

>>> import ast
>>> print ast.literal_eval("{12: 'mydict', 14: (1, 2, 3)}")
{12: 'mydict', 14: (1, 2, 3)}

I would suggest that you use YAML for your file format so you can tinker with it on the disc

How does it look:
  - It is indent based
  - It can represent dictionaries and lists
  - It is easy for humans to understand
An example: This block of code is an example of YAML (a dict holding a list and a string)
Full syntax: http://www.yaml.org/refcard.html

To get it in python, just easy_install pyyaml. See http://pyyaml.org/

It comes with easy file save / load functions, that I can't remember right this minute.