Write and read a list from file

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If you don’t need it to be human-readable/editable, the easiest solution is to just use pickle.

To write:

with open(the_filename, 'wb') as f:
    pickle.dump(my_list, f)

To read:

with open(the_filename, 'rb') as f:
    my_list = pickle.load(f)

If you do need them to be human-readable, we need more information.

If my_list is guaranteed to be a list of strings with no embedded newlines, just write them one per line:

with open(the_filename, 'w') as f:
    for s in my_list:
        f.write(s + '\n')

with open(the_filename, 'r') as f:
    my_list = [line.rstrip('\n') for line in f]

If they’re Unicode strings rather than byte strings, you’ll want to encode them. (Or, worse, if they’re byte strings, but not necessarily in the same encoding as your system default.)

If they might have newlines, or non-printable characters, etc., you can use escaping or quoting. Python has a variety of different kinds of escaping built into the stdlib.

Let’s use unicode-escape here to solve both of the above problems at once:

with open(the_filename, 'w') as f:
    for s in my_list:
        f.write((s + u'\n').encode('unicode-escape'))

with open(the_filename, 'r') as f:
    my_list = [line.decode('unicode-escape').rstrip(u'\n') for line in f]

You can also use the 3.x-style solution in 2.x, with either the codecs module or the io module:*

import io

with io.open(the_filename, 'w', encoding='unicode-escape') as f:
    f.writelines(line + u'\n' for line in my_list)

with open(the_filename, 'r') as f:
    my_list = [line.rstrip(u'\n') for line in f]

* TOOWTDI, so which is the one obvious way? It depends… For the short version: if you need to work with Python versions before 2.6, use codecs; if not, use io.

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