Data serialisation¶

If the data is to be serialised flat, Python offers two functions:

`repr`¶

repr() outputs a printable representation of the input, for example:

[1]:

data = { "id" : "veit", "first_name": "Veit", "last_name": "Schiele" }

print(repr(data))

{'id': 'veit', 'first_name': 'Veit', 'last_name': 'Schiele'}

[2]:

with open("data.txt", "w") as f:
    f.write(repr(data))

The ast.literal_eval() function parses and analyses the Python data type of an expression. Supported data types are strings, numbers, tuples, lists, dictionaries and None.

[3]:

import ast

with open("data.txt", "r") as f:
    d = ast.literal_eval(f.read())

print(d)

{'id': 'veit', 'first_name': 'Veit', 'last_name': 'Schiele'}