Decoding the output of Pickle Python

Question

I was trying a small example where I was trying to dump a data structure to a file , just like I would do in Perl with the help of Data::Dumper. The following is the example I tried

import pickle
ff = open('/Users/arunpotharaju/hell','wb')
favorite_color = { "lion": "yellow", "kitty": "red" }
pickle.dump(favorite_color,ff,0)

The following is the output in the file hell

(dp0
S'lion'
p1
S'yellow'
p2
sS'kitty'
p3
S'red'
p4
s.

I was looking for more of a Data::Dumper style output from Perl, which is very helpful in debugging. Can I make it any better?

See this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2540567/is-there-a-python-equivalent-to-perls-datadumper — Eugen Constantin Dinca, Jul 31 '13 at 02:23
pickle isn't for debugging - you should use it when you need to load the objects back into Python. Use pprint or maybe json for your debugging — John La Rooy, Jul 31 '13 at 02:26

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 02 '13 at 20:21

In that case, you could use json to dump a readable version of your dict:

import json
ff = open('/Users/arunpotharaju/hell','wb')
favorite_color = { "lion": "yellow", "kitty": "red" }
ff.write(json.dumps(favorite_color))

json is not able to dump complex data structures the way pickle works, but it can dump dicts, lists, etc.

Decoding the output of Pickle Python

1 Answers1