using marshal module

[Christine Davis]

Quinn Dunkan wrote in message ...
>On Wed, 2 Feb 2000 17:17:08 +1300, Christine Davis <c.davis at actrix.co.nz>
wrote:
  [snip]

>When you opened the file, you opened it in read mode (think
>fp = fopen(filename, "r"); in C).  Now, when you tried to dump your data to
>it, marshal should have thrown an IOError, but instead it silently didn't
>write anything.  This seems unpython-like and a problem with marshal, to
me.
>
>What you want to do is either:
>fp = open(filename, 'r+b') # b in case it gets run on windows
>and then
>fp.seek(0)
>before dump.
>
>Or:
>fp.close()
>fp.open(filename, 'wb')
>before dump.
>
>Also, marshal.dump(datastuff['field'], fp) will store the string
>'new string of stuff' to filename, which is probably not what you want.

This is all working fine now -  at least,  stuff is being written back to
the file. Kind of.  At the moment,  it is storing a string (as an array of
characters);  but the behaviour I'm looking for is to store an array of
strings.  I've tried datastuff['field'][index] = 'string' but that gave me
an error (TypeError: object doesn't support item assignment)
At the moment, the file the information is stored in,  has

'field': ['string', 'nextstring', 'anotherstring']

the strings have no spaces,  if that helps.

Cheers,
Christine