[Python-Dev] undesireable unpickle behavior, proposed fix (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Jan 27 20:57:46 CET 2009

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 11:40 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Hm. This would change the pickling format though. Wouldn't just interning (short) strings on unpickling be simpler? Sure - that's what Jake had proposed. However, it is always difficult to select which strings to intern - his heuristics (IIUC) is to intern all strings that appear as dictionary keys. Whether this is good enough, I don't know. In particular, it might intern very large strings that aren't identifiers at all.

Just set a size limit, e.g. 30 or 100. It's just a heuristic. I believe somewhere in Python itself I intern string literals if they are reasonably short and fit the pattern of an identifier; I'd worry that the pattern matching would slow down unpickling more than the expected benefit though, so perhaps just a size test would be better.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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