Why does pickle use eval for loading string values?

[Mike C. Fletcher]

  >>> b = '"this \\" there"'
  >>> eval( b)
'this " there'
  >>> b[1:-1]
'this \\" there'
  >>>

That is, if you're storing the string in a format for eval, then you're
_not_ formatting it for restore from [1:-1].  Because of that the change
would be backward incompatible with every previous version of
pickle/cPickle.

HTH,
Mike

Brian Kelley wrote:

 > Here's something I never quite understood.  pickle and cPickle use eval
 > to load string values.  This seems fairly neat but why is it necessary?
 >
 > One fairly serious drawback is that the eval interns the string values
 > which means that they can never get garbage collected.  This has been a
 > problem for some of my applications (you can do a google search for
 > pickle and intern to see an old thread on this)
 >
 > I replaced load_string in pickle with the following:
 >
 > self.append(rep[1:-1])
 >
 > initially the loader was
 >
 > self.append(eval(rep,
 >       {'__builtins__': {}})) # Let's be careful
 >
 > I applied the same thing to cPickle.
 >
 > This appears to be slightly faster and doesn't have the intern problem
 > mentioned above.
 >
 > So what am I missing?  Is there some reason why eval should be used?
 >
 > I'm tempted to report this as a bug in pickle since interning strings is
 > a undocumented side-effect.  The fix seems easy so please shoot my down
 > if I'm being niave.
 >
 > Brian Kelley
 > Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research
 >


-- 
_______________________________________
    Mike C. Fletcher
    http://members.rogers.com/mcfletch/