Readable Persistance?

[Chris S.]

David Bolen wrote:

> "Chris S." <chrisks at NOSPAMudel.edu> writes:
> 
> 
>>I'm trying to write programs that make use of a lot of dynamic
>>structures. To aid in debugging and data extraction, I'd like to
>>persist these objects in a form that's readable, but one that also
>>preserves handles (ie for lambda expressions, dictionaries, lists,
>>etc).
> 
> 
> Can you clarify what you might mean by "debugging and data extraction"?
> 
> The reason I ask is that if you're primarily concerned with the
> ability to access the data easily outside of the program that
> generated it, then have you considered just interatively loading your
> picking file and performing whatever manipulations you might want?
> 
> That is, if pickle satisfies your need for the persistence of the data
> structures themselves, perhaps the readability of the raw pickle file
> need not be a problem if you consider just using Python to load that
> file in when you need to examine it.  You could always interactively
> (or with small scripts if you do repetitive operations) then dump
> selected portions of the data to more parseable flat text files for
> use with other tools if necessary, while not losing any of the
> richness of the original data structure.
> 
> I know that I've done this numerous times in the past (both with
> pickle files as well as with ZODB databases) as a way to examine
> stored program state in an interactive manner outside of the original
> application.
> 
> -- David

The reason why I'd prefer the data stored in a readable format is so I 
wouldn't have to use an interpreter to view the data (well, aside from a 
text editor). Pickle doesn't even fully cut it for me since it's unable 
to save lambda expressions and user defined function handles.