Dumping and loading with pickle

The pickle module is Python's native format to make objects persistent.

The Python Standard Library says this about pickle:

The pickle module can transform a complex object into a byte stream and it can transform the byte stream into an object with the same internal structure. Perhaps the most obvious thing to do with these byte streams is to write them onto a file, but it is also conceivable to send them across a network or store them in a database.

The focus of pickle is Python and only Python. This is not a data interchange format such as JSON, YAML, CSV, or XML that can be used with applications written in other languages.

The pickle module is tightly integrated with Python in a variety of ways. For example, the __reduce__() and __reduce_ex__() methods of a class exist to support the pickle processing.

We can easily pickle our microblog in the following manner:

import pickle
with open("travel_blog.p","wb") as target:
    pickle.dump( travel, target )

This exports...