How to serialize Python objects in a human-readable format? [closed]

I need to store Python structures made of lists / dictionaries, tuples into a human-readable format. The idea is like using something similar to pickle, but pickle is not human-friendly. Other options that come to my mind are YAML (through PyYAML and JSON (through simplejson) serializers.

Any other option that comes to your mind?

Answer

For simple cases pprint() and eval() come to mind.

Using your example:

>>> d = {'age': 27,
...  'name': 'Joe',
...  'numbers': [1, 
...              2, 
...              3,
...              4,
...              5],
...  'subdict': {
...              'first': 1, 
...              'second': 2,
...               'third': 3
...              }
... }
>>> 
>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> pprint(d)
{'age': 27,
 'name': 'Joe',
 'numbers': [1, 2, 3, 4, 5],
 'subdict': {'first': 1, 'second': 2, 'third': 3}}
>>> 

I would think twice about fixing two requirements with the same tool. Have you considered using pickle for the serializing and then pprint() (or a more fancy object viewer) for humans looking at the objects?