Mastering Object-oriented Python

Chapter 9. Serializing and Saving – JSON, YAML, Pickle, CSV, and XML

To make a Python object persistent, we must convert it to bytes and write the bytes to a file. We'll call this serialization; it is also called marshaling, deflating or encoding. We'll look at several ways to convert a Python object to a string or a stream of bytes.

Each of these serialization schemes can also be called a physical data format. Each format offers some advantages and disadvantages. There's no best format to represent the objects. We must distinguish a logical data format, which may be a simple reordering or change in the use of whitespace that doesn't change the value of the object but changes the sequence of bytes.

It's important to note that (except for CSV) these ...