What's the Pythonic way to store a data block in a Python script?

Question

Perl allows me to use the __DATA__ token in a script to mark the start of a data block. I can read the data using the DATA filehandle. What's the Pythonic way to store a data block in a script?

Answer 1

It depends on your data, but dict literals and multi-line strings are both really good ways.

state_abbr = {
    'MA': 'Massachusetts',
    'MI': 'Michigan',
    'MS': 'Mississippi',
    'MN': 'Minnesota',
    'MO': 'Missouri',
    }

gettysburg = """
Four score and seven years ago,
our fathers brought forth on this continent
a new nation, 
conceived in liberty
and dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal.
"""

Answer 2

Use the StringIO module to create an in-source file-like object:

from StringIO import StringIO

textdata = """\
Now is the winter of our discontent,
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.
"""

# in place of __DATA__ = open('richard3.txt')
__DATA__ = StringIO(textdata)
for d in __DATA__:
    print d

__DATA__.seek(0)
print __DATA__.readline()

Prints:

Now is the winter of our discontent,

Made glorious summer by this sun of York.

Now is the winter of our discontent,

(I just called this __DATA__ to align with your original question. In practice, this would not be good Python naming style - something like datafile would be more appropriate.)