Pickling arbitrary character strings on Windows

[Nicholas K. Sauter]

It would be good to be able to pickle strings containing arbitrary ASCII
characters, for example to encode data at the C level.  But on Windows
it is impossible to do a binary unpickle of a string that has an
embedded ASCII 26 (octal 032).  This example code tells the whole story:

from pickle import dump,load

def myfunc(i):
    pro = "I_am_a_" +chr(i)+ "string"
    f = open('try.bin','w'); dump(pro,f,1); f.close()
    g = open('try.bin','r'); str = g.readline()# i=10 is a linefeed
(that's OK)
    print "read string",i,len(str),"characters"

if __name__=="__main__":
    for i in xrange(256):
      myfunc(i)

Some obvious workarounds are to use formatted output (dump(pro,f,0)) or
to use Unix instead of Windows.  But is there any way to implement a
practical binary string pickle on Windows?

Nick Sauter, LBNL
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: nksauter.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 301 bytes
Desc: Card for Nicholas K. Sauter
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/attachments/20010306/6fdc1b7c/attachment.vcf>