List to Text back to List

[Aaron Brady]

On Nov 6, 2:18 pm, SimonPalmer <simon.pal... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 6, 8:11 pm, "Chris Rebert" <c... at rebertia.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 12:04 PM, SimonPalmer <simon.pal... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Hi, I am looking for a way to convert a List of floating point numbers
> > > to and from text.  I am embedding it in an XML document and am looking
> > > for a neat way to serialise and de-serialise a list from a text node.
> > > I can easily write something to do it manually but I wondered whether
> > > List had native support to go to and from text.
>
> > > If not List, are there any other collections/arrays that do this?
>
> > It's not really a matter of the collection, but more a matter of
> > serialization format/library.
>
> > If you want the serialized representation to be human-readable, use
> > JSON (http://docs.python.org/library/json.html#module-json).
> > If that's not a requirement, use pickle
> > (http://docs.python.org/library/pickle.html#module-pickle).
> > Both modules can convert simple Python data, such as your list of
> > floats, to a bytestream and back again.
>
> > Cheers,
> > Chris
> > --
> > Follow the path of the Iguana...http://rebertia.com
>
> > > TIA
> > > Simon
> > > --
> > >http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
> I looked at pickle, but the problem is that I want my XML to be
> readable by languages other than python, so it sort of precludes it.
> JSON would be perfect, but I think the module only exists in 2.6, is
> that right?  Unfortunately I am bound to 2.4.
>
> It is looking more and more like I am going to have to roll my own.

There is PyYAML, yet-another-markup-language.  Bindings go all the way
back to 2.3.

http://pyyaml.org/wiki/PyYAML

You can always just do ' '.join( alist ) to store, and
astring.split( ) to load.