How to check if an object is pickleable

Question

I have a list of objects of various types that I want to pickle. I would like to pickle only those which are pickleable. Is there a standard way to check if an object is of

Answer 1

I would propose duck testing in this case. Try to pickle into a temporary file or a memory file, as you find suitable, then if it fails discard the result, if it succeeds rename.

Why?

In python you can check if the object has some properties in two ways.

Check if object is an instance of some Abstract Base Class. E.g. Number "The root of the numeric hierarchy. If you just want to check if an argument x is a number, without caring what kind, use isinstance(x, Number)."

Or try it and then handle exceptions. This occurs during many occasions. The pythonic philosopy is based around the duck. Duck typing, duck test, and EAFP are the keywords.

I even believe the 1st one has been properly introduced with python3 under the pressure from the part of the community, while many still strongly believe duck is the way to go with python.

AFAIK there is no special preconditions that can be checked, nor any ABC that object can be checked against in case of pickling. So all that is left is duck.

Maybe something else could be attempted but probably it is not worth of it. It would be very hard to do manual introspection of the object to find out preliminarily if it's suitable for pickling.