[Python-Dev] pickle self-delimiting

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Tue, 1 Apr 2014 19:29:38 +0100
Charles-François Natali <cf.natali at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Unless I'm mistaken, pickle's documentation doesn't mention that the pickle
> wire-format is self-delimiting. Is there any reason why it's not documented?

No reason AFAIK. However, the fact that it is self-delimited is implicit
in the fact that "Bytes past the pickled object’s representation are
ignored": https://docs.python.org/dev/library/pickle.html#pickle.load

Also, note that protocol 4 now features a length-prefix framing to
improve buffering performance with arbitrary streams.

Regards

Antoine.