Shelve or pickle module

[Guillaume Bog]

Hello,

I read and re-read "Python in a Nutshell" written by Alex Martelli,
who knows what he is talking about. I'm a bit new to python and I'm
going to start doing persistence side on a project. Martelli's book
seems to tell me that I should use shelve module, but any code I
browsed is using pickle instead. Is there any reason to prefer pickle
over shelve?

Thanks,

[Gabriel Genellina]

A shelve is just a persistent dictionary that uses pickle to store the objects.
If you want to store one or a few objects, using pickle directly may be easier.
Any problem you may have with pickle (nonpickleable objects, security risks) will happen with shelve too.

--
Gabriel Genellina

[Ville M. Vainio]

"Gabriel Genellina" <gags...@yahoo.com.ar> writes:

> A shelve is just a persistent dictionary that uses pickle to store
> the objects. If you want to store one or a few objects, using
> pickle directly may be easier. Any problem you may have with pickle
> (nonpickleable objects, security risks) will happen with shelve too.

Shameless plug warning!

If you want to store pickles "directly" in a directory with
shelve-like dict API, you may also be interested in my "pickleshare"
module:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pickleshare/0.3