TypeError: can't pickle HASH objects?

[Aaron "Castironpi" Brady]

On Oct 1, 2:50 pm, est <electronix... at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> import md5
> >>> a=md5.md5()
> >>> import pickle
> >>> pickle.dumps(a)
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
>   File "C:\Python25\lib\pickle.py", line 1366, in dumps
>     Pickler(file, protocol).dump(obj)
>   File "C:\Python25\lib\pickle.py", line 224, in dump
>     self.save(obj)
>   File "C:\Python25\lib\pickle.py", line 306, in save
>     rv = reduce(self.proto)
>   File "C:\Python25\lib\copy_reg.py", line 69, in _reduce_ex
>     raise TypeError, "can't pickle %s objects" % base.__name__
> TypeError: can't pickle HASH objects
>
> Why can't I pickle a md5 object? Is it because md5 algorithm needs to
> read 512-bits at a time?
>
> I need to md5() some stream, pause(python.exe quits), and resume
> later.  It seems that the md5 and hashlib in  std module could not be
> serialized?
>
> Do I have to implement md5 algorithm again for this special occasion?
>
> Or is there anyway to assige a digest when creating md5 objects?

Can you just pickle the stream, the part of it you've read so far?