Using Pickle to serialize and deserialize an object

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The pickle module implements an algorithm for turning an arbitrary Python object into a series of bytes. This process is also called serializing the object. The byte stream representing the object can then be transmitted or stored, and later reconstructed to create a new object with the same characteristics.

For the simplest code, we use the dump() and load() functions.

To serialize the object

import pickle

# An arbitrary collection of objects supported by pickle.
data = {
    'a': [1, 2.0, 3, 4+6j],
    'b': ("character string", b"byte string"),
    'c': {None, True, False}
}

with open('data.pickle', 'wb') as f:
    # Pickle the 'data' dictionary using the highest protocol available.
    pickle.dump(data, f, pickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL)

To deserialize the object

import pickle

with open('data.pickle', 'rb') as f:
    # The protocol version used is detected automatically, so we do not
    # have to specify it.
    data = pickle.load(f)

Using pickle and byte objects

It is also possible to serialize into and deserialize out of byte objects, using the dumps and loads function, which are equivalent to dump and load.

serialized_data = pickle.dumps(data, pickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL)
# type(serialized_data) is bytes

deserialized_data = pickle.loads(serialized_data)
# deserialized_data == data

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