Common use-cases for pickle in Python

Question

I\'ve looked at the pickle documentation, but I don\'t understand where pickle is useful.

What are some common use-cases for pickle?

Answer 1

I can tell you the uses I use it for and have seen it used for:

• Game profile saves
• Game data saves like lives and health
• Previous records of say numbers inputed to a program

Those are the ones I use it for at least

Answer 2

To add a real-world example: The Sphinx documentation tool for Python uses pickle to cache parsed documents and cross-references between documents, to speed up subsequent builds of the documentation.

Answer 3

Pickle is like "Save As.." and "Open.." for your data structures and classes. Let's say I want to save my data structures so that it is persistent between program runs.

Saving:

with open("save.p", "wb") as f:    
    pickle.dump(myStuff, f)        

Loading:

try:
    with open("save.p", "rb") as f:
        myStuff = pickle.load(f)
except:
    myStuff = defaultdict(dict)

Now I don't have to build myStuff from scratch all over again, and I can just pick(le) up from where I left off.