Commit a092ba1a authored by Andrew M. Kuchling's avatar Andrew M. Kuchling

Add PEP 307 section

parent a978e106
......@@ -883,6 +883,50 @@ by Kevin Altis, Dave Cole, Andrew McNamara, Skip Montanaro, Cliff Wells.
\end{seealso}
%======================================================================
\section{PEP 307: Pickle Enhancements \label{section-pep305}}
The \module{pickle} and \module{cPickle} modules received some
attention during the 2.3 development cycle. In 2.2, new-style classes
could be pickled without difficult, but they weren't pickled very
compactly; \pep{307} quotes a trivial example where a new-style class
results in a pickled string three times longer than that for a classic
class.
The solution was to invent a new pickle protocol. The
\function{pickle.dumps()} function has supported a text-or-binary flag
for a long time. In 2.3, this flag is redefined from a Boolean to an
integer; 0 is the old text-mode pickle format, 1 is the old binary
format, and now 2 is a new 2.3-specific format. (A new constant,
\constant{pickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL}, can be used to select the fanciest
protocol available.)
Unpickling is no longer considered a safe operation. 2.2's
\module{pickle} provided hooks for trying to prevent unsafe classes
from being unpickled (specifically, a
\member{__safe_for_unpickling__} attribute), but none of this code
was ever audited and therefore it's all been ripped out in 2.3. You
should not unpickle untrusted data in any version of Python.
To reduce the pickling overhead for new-style classes, a new interface
for customizing pickling was added using three special methods:
\method{__getstate__}, \method{__setstate__}, and
\method{__getnewargs__}. Consult \pep{307} for the full semantics
of these methods.
As a way to compress pickles yet further, it's now possible to use
integer codes instead of long strings to identify pickled classes.
The Python Software Foundation will maintain a list of standardized
codes; there's also a range of codes for private use. Currently no
codes have been specified.
\begin{seealso}
\seepep{307}{Extensions to the pickle protocol}{Written and implemented
by Guido van Rossum and Tim Peters.}
\end{seealso}
%======================================================================
\section{Extended Slices\label{section-slices}}
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