pickle module doens't work

[Peter Otten]

Omer Korat wrote:

> I'm working on a project in Python 2.7. I have a few large objects, and I
> want to save them for later use, so that it will be possible to load them
> whole from a file, instead of creating them every time anew. It is
> critical that they be  transportable between platforms. Problem is, when I
> use the 2.7 pickle module, all I get is a file containing a string
> representing the commands used to create the object. But there's nothing I
> can do with this string, because it only contains information about the
> object's module, class and parameters. And that way, they aren't
> transportable. In python 3.3 this problem is solved, and the pickle.dump
> generates a series of bytes, which can be loaded in any other module
> independently of anything. But in my project, I need NLTK 2.0, which is
> written in python 2.7...
> 
> Anybody has suggestions? Maybe there is a way to use pickle so that it
> yields the results I need? Or is there any other module that does pickle's
> job? Or perhaps there is a way to mechanically translate between python
> versions, so I'll be able to use pickle from 3.3 inside an application
> written in 2.7? Or perhaps somebody knows of a way to embed a piece of 3.3
> code inside a 2.7 program?
> 
> It can't be I'm the only one who wants to save python objects for later
> use! There must be a standard method to do this, but I couldn't find any
> on the web! If someone can solve this for me I'll be so grateful.

Pickling works the same way in Python 2 and Python 3. For classes only the 
names are dumped, so you need (the same version of) NLTK on the source and 
the destination platform.

If you can provide a short demo of what works in Python 3 but fails in 
Python 2 we may be able to find the actual problem or misunderstanding.
Maybe it is just that different protocols are used by default? I so, try

with open(filename, "wb") as f:
    pickle.dump(f, your_data, protocol=pickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL)