Writing a list to a file with Python

Question

Is this the cleanest way to write a list to a file, since writelines() doesn\'t insert newline characters?

file.writelines([\"%s\\n\" % item  fo         


        

Answer 1

What are you going to do with the file? Does this file exist for humans, or other programs with clear interoperability requirements?

If you are just trying to serialize a list to disk for later use by the same python app, you should be pickleing the list.

import pickle

with open('outfile', 'wb') as fp:
    pickle.dump(itemlist, fp)

To read it back:

with open ('outfile', 'rb') as fp:
    itemlist = pickle.load(fp)