Keeping the data of a variable between runs of code

Question

For a school project I am making a hangman game in Python. Right now my code picks a word from a dictionary like so:

WordList = [\"cat\", \"hat\", \"jump\",          


        

Answer 1

Simply pickle the data you want to keep persistent. Since your use case doesn't require very complex data storage, pickling is a very good option. A small example:

import pickle

word_list = ["cat", "hat", "jump", "house", "orange", "brick", "horse", "word"]

# do your thing here, like
word_list.append("monty")

# open a pickle file
filename = 'mypickle.pk'

with open(filename, 'wb') as fi:
    # dump your data into the file
    pickle.dump(word_list, fi)

Later when you need to use it again, just load it up:

# load your data back to memory when you need it
with open(filename, 'rb') as fi:
    word_list = pickle.load(fi)

Ta-da! You have data persistence now. More reading here. A few important pointers:

1. Notice the 'b' when I use open() to open a file. Pickles are commonly stored in a binary format, so you must open the file in a binary mode.
2. I used the with context manager. This ensures that a file is safely closed once all my work with the file is done.