What is the correct way to save and retrieve dictionaries in Julia?

Question

I have seen that Julia adequately interprets "MAT" files which have structures in them which are read as dictionaries without problem. Now I have created a dictionary of my own, which has the following structure

(String, String)=> [ Int, Int, Int]

on each entry. I can save it with writedlm and it produces a very orderly tabular text file, separated by tabs (\t), but then I cannot retrieve it without doing a LOT of parsing. If I use readdlm I get an array of type Any, with the very uncomfortable structure at each line

"(\"Bla bla\", \"tururu\")"     "[a, b, c]"

That is, two columns of Strings which contain signs such as '"' and '['.

Answer 1

You could use the JLD (Julia Data) submodule included in the HDF5 package:

Pkg.add("HDF5")
using HDF5, JLD
d = Dict(
    ("a", "b") => [1, 2, 3],
    ("c", "d") => [4, 5, 6],
    ("e", "f") => [7, 8, 9]
)
save("data.jld", "data", d)
load("data.jld")["data"]

the advantage of the JLD module is that it preserves the exact type information of each variable.

Answer 2

The solution using JLD suggested by SalchiPapa no longer works for some reason. Here is an updated version (just changed the imports and the file extension) of their example using JLD2:

using JLD2, FileIO
d = Dict(
        ("a", "b") => [1, 2, 3],
        ("c", "d") => [4, 5, 6],
        ("e", "f") => [7, 8, 9]
    )
save("data.jld2", "data", d)
load("data.jld2")["data"]