Pickle all attributes except one

Question

What is the best way to write a __getstate__ method that pickles almost all of an object\'s attributes, but excludes a few?

I have an object wi

Answer 1

I'd cut to the root of your problem, and try to serialize the so-called 'un-pickleable' items first. To do this, I'd use dill, which can serialize almost anything in python. Dill also has some good tools for helping you understand what is causing your pickling to fail when your code fails.

>>> import dill
>>> dill.loads(dill.dumps(your_bad_object))
>>> ...
>>> # if you get a pickling error, use dill's tools to figure out a workaround
>>> dill.detect.badobjects(your_bad_object, depth=0)
>>> dill.detect.badobjects(your_bad_object, depth=1)
>>> ...

If you absolutely wanted to, you could use dill's badobjects (or one of the other detection functions) to dive recursively into your object's reference chain, and pop out the unpickleable objects, instead of calling it at at every depth, as above.