Hi Mike, Converting an (almost)arbitrary object into a string is what the Pickle module does. CPickle is faster. Take a look into into it in the docs.
Here's an example: >>> import cPickle >>> lala = [1, 2, 3, 'four', 'V'] >>> lala [1, 2, 3, 'four', 'V'] >>> fileo = open('lala.pkl', 'w') >>> cPickle.dump(lala, fileo) >>> fileo.close() >>> fileo = open('lala.pkl', 'r') >>> serialized_data = fileo.read() >>> serialized_data "(lp1\nI1\naI2\naI3\naS'four'\np2\naS'V'\na." >>> fileo.seek(0) >>> recovered = cPickle.load(fileo) >>> recovered [1, 2, 3, 'four', 'V'] >>> See the docs and feel free to ask if there is some part oyu do not understand. Hope it helps! Hugo Mike Haft wrote: > Hello, > I've been working on a problem and have now sorted most of it (thanks > to some help from the list). > > All the ways of writing data to a file I know keep telling me that lists > can't be written to the file. I'm trying to convert data from one set of > files into files of a different format. But the easiest way to get the > data from the first set of files is in a list(s). > > So, is there any way to convert lists to strings? Or a way to write lists > to a file? > > Thanks > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor > _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor