Load a list subset with pickle?

[Robert Kern]

On 2009-10-13 13:00 PM, Peng Yu wrote:
> I use pickle to dump a long list. But when I load it, I only want to
> load the first a few elements in the list. I am wondering if there is
> a easy way to do so? Thank you!

Not by pickling the list. However, you can concatenate pickles, so you could 
just pickle each item from the list in order to the same file and only unpickle 
the first few.

In [1]: import cPickle

In [2]: from cStringIO import StringIO

In [3]: very_long_list = range(10)

In [4]: f = StringIO()

In [5]: for item in very_long_list:
    ...:     cPickle.dump(item, f)
    ...:
    ...:

In [6]: f.seek(0,0)

In [7]: cPickle.load(f)
Out[7]: 0

In [8]: cPickle.load(f)
Out[8]: 1

In [9]: cPickle.load(f)
Out[9]: 2

In [10]: cPickle.load(f)
Out[10]: 3


-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco