CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpickle
Bob Fang
Bob Fang

Reputation: 7381

Can I pickle a string without any dump?

Say I have a string "[A,B,C]" and I want to convert it into a list [A,B,C], I have googled around and I know I should use pickle, but it seems that before I pickle.loads I seems to have to pickle.dumps the object, is that true? If yes, how can I walk around this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1811

Answers (2)

Brendan Long
Brendan Long

Reputation: 54242

pickle.dumps is the function that serializes Python objects into Pickle strings, and pickle.loads converts serialized Pickle strings into Python objects. You're basically asking how to deserialize an object which isn't serialized. The answer is that you can't.

However, bikeshredder is correct -- your string is already in JSON's serialization format, so you can use json.loads.

Upvotes: 2

bikeshedder
bikeshedder

Reputation: 7487

The string "[A,B,C]" is neither a pickle format nor any other serialization format known to me. It is not Python code either.

If you just want to deserialize some data (e.g. read from a file) I would recommend to use JSON. It is easy to write, fast to parse and is a well established standard.

>>> import json
>>> data_json = '["A", "B", "C"]'
>>> data = json.loads(data_json)
>>> data
[u'A', u'B', u'C']
>>> data_json = json.dumps(data)
>>> data_json
'["A", "B", "C"]'

Upvotes: 1

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