Pickle translation

[Fredrik Lundh]

Skip Montanaro wrote:
> Interpretation of \x escapes was tightened up in 2.0 I believe.  In versions
> earlier than 2.0 '\xyy' is interpreted as the four-character sequence:
>
>     \ x y y

not if yy is hexadecimal digits.  the difference is that in 1.5.2, \x
could consume more than 2 hex digits.

> In 2.0 and 2.1 the ValueError you see is raised because "yy" can't be
> interpreted as a hex number.

shouldn't happen, though: pickle uses repr, and repr didn't ever
create \x escapes in 1.5.2.

you could get this problem if you move text pickles from 2.1 back to
1.5.2, though: "\x1234" is one character under 1.5.2, three under 2.0
and later.  and 2.1's repr uses \xnn instead of \ddd on output...

> I'm not sure what the solution is.  Someone with more pickle/string/
> internals knowledge will probably have some ideas.

one possible workaround could be to load the pickle under 1.5.2,
and write it out as a binary pickle:

    infile = open("data")
    object = pickle.load(infile)

    outfile = open("outdata", "wb")
    pickle.dump(object, outfile, 1)
    outfile.close()

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