The pickle module provided with Python is so useful that I’m surprised I haven’t used it before. Pickle allows you to save an entire data structure (such as an object) to disk as a binary file in a effortless (and fairly efficient) manner. For example, in my latest project I have created a Monte Carlo simulation that can take quite a bit of time to run. I also need to make multiple runs to get statistics on the results. At the end of each run, I need to dump the resulting data to disk so that it can be read in later by an analysis program. If I had to write data in a format that could be interchanged with other scientific software, I’d use the hdf5 format with the pytables package. However, right now I just need to get something working, and the pickle module is perfect. Here is how I save an object called box: