What are you going to do with the file? Does this file exist for humans, or other programs with clear interoperability requirements, or are you just trying to serialize a list to disk for later use by the same python app. If the second case is it, you should be pickleing the list.

import pickle

with open('outfile', 'wb') as fp:
    pickle.dump(itemlist, fp)

To read it back:

with open ('outfile', 'rb') as fp:
    itemlist = pickle.load(fp)

What are you going to do with the file? Does this file exist for humans, or other programs with clear interoperability requirements?

If you are just trying to serialize a list to disk for later use by the same python app, you should be pickleing the list.

import pickle

with open('outfile', 'wb') as fp:
    pickle.dump(itemlist, fp)

To read it back:

with open ('outfile', 'rb') as fp:
    itemlist = pickle.load(fp)

What are you going to do with the file? Does this file exist for humans, or other programs with clear interoperability requirements, or are you just trying to serialize a list to disk for later use by the same python app. If the second case is it, you should be pickleing the list.

import pickle

pickle.dump(itemlist, outfile)

To read it back:

itemlist = pickle.load(infile)

What are you going to do with the file? Does this file exist for humans, or other programs with clear interoperability requirements, or are you just trying to serialize a list to disk for later use by the same python app. If the second case is it, you should be pickleing the list.

import pickle

with open('outfile', 'wb') as fp:
    pickle.dump(itemlist, fp)

To read it back:

with open ('outfile', 'rb') as fp:
    itemlist = pickle.load(fp)