How do I read and write with msgpack? [closed]

Question

How do I serialize / deserialize a dictionary data with msgpack?

Answer 1

The Python docs seem not to be so good, so here is my try.

Installation

pip install msgpack

Read and Write msgpack

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import msgpack

# Define data
data = {'a list': [1, 42, 3.141, 1337, 'help'],
        'a string': 'bla',
        'another dict': {'foo': 'bar',
                         'key': 'value',
                         'the answer': 42}}

# Write msgpack file
with open('data.msgpack', 'w') as outfile:
    msgpack.pack(data, outfile)

# Read msgpack file
with open('data.msgpack') as data_file:
    # data_loaded = json.load(data_file)
    data_loaded = msgpack.unpack(data_file)

print(data == data_loaded)

Alternatives

• CSV: Super simple format (read & write)
• JSON: Nice for writing human-readable data; VERY commonly used (read & write)
• YAML: YAML is a superset of JSON, but easier to read (read & write, comparison of JSON and YAML)
• pickle: A Python serialization format (read & write)
• MessagePack (Python package): More compact representation (read & write)
• HDF5 (Python package): Nice for matrices (read & write)
• XML: exists too *sigh* (read & write)

For your application, the following might be important:

• Support by other programming languages
• Reading / writing performance
• Compactness (file size)

See also: Comparison of data serialization formats

In case you are rather looking for a way to make configuration files, you might want to read my short article Configuration files in Python