Python Programming for Biology: Bioinformatics and Beyond

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Since the system zero time, which is somewhat arbitrarily 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970, the start of the

computing ‘epoch’.

The ‘

pickle

’ module

The  module  pickle  can  be  used  to  serialise  Python  objects,  to  convert  them  to/from  a

textual representation, which may be saved to disk etc. All the normal Python data types

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as well as module-level classes and functions can be serialised in this way. Custom classes

may also be serialised if the class is imported into the current name-space of a program. It

should  be  noted  that  in  Python  2  there  is  also  a  cPickle  module,  which  is  a  faster  C-

language implementation of pickle, and normally cPickle is the one to use unless you are

defining  pickle  subclasses.  In  Python  3  there  is  no  cPickle  module,  and  pickle

automatically uses the C-language implementation when it is available.