Storing a python set in a database with django

Question

I have a need to store a python set in a database for accessing later. What's the best way to go about doing this? My initial plan was to use a textfield on my model and just store the set as a comma or pipe delimited string, then when I need to pull it back out for use in my app I could initialize a set by calling split on the string. Obviously if there is a simple way to serialize the set to store it in the db so I can pull it back out as a set when I need to use it later that would be best.

Answer 1

If your database is better at storing blobs of binary data, you can pickle your set. Actually, pickle stores data as text by default, so it might be better than the delimited string approach anyway. Just pickle.dumps(your_set) and unpickled = pickle.loads(database_string) later.