python 3: storing a hash in a file and importing it into a script

Question

I'm interested in Python 3 code that writes a hash to a disk file as a hash and then code that imports it into a script directly as a hash.

If importing wouldn't work then I'd be content to open and read a file, but I'd prefer not to have to rebuild a hash from a list every single time. I know that creating a list from a file is trivial, but searching a list is prohibitively slow in my script, so I want to use a hash because of the faster search. I don't actually need key-value pairs, just a list, and the hash would be purely to benchmark execution speeds at first. Thanks for all replies.

Answer 1

In order to dump an object (such as a dictionary) into a file in a nice pythonic way, you can use the "pickle" module. For example:

import pickle
mydic={"k1":[1,2,3],"k2":[6,6,6],"k3":"cats"}
f=open("./somefile.bin","wb")
pickle.dump(mydic,f)

You can then load the dumped object using pickel.load(), as described in the python docs (other options are specified as well): https://docs.python.org/2/library/pickle.html