Elegant way to store dictionary permanently with Python?

Why not dump it to a JSON file, and then load it from there where you need it?

import jsonwith open('my_dict.json', 'w') as f:    json.dump(my_dict, f)# elsewhere...with open('my_dict.json') as f:    my_dict = json.load(f)

Loading from JSON is fairly efficient.

Another option would be to use pickle, but unlike JSON, the files it generates aren't human-readable so you lose out on the visual verification you liked from your old method.

Why mess with all these serialization methods? It's already written to a file as a Python dict (although with the unfortunate name 'dict'). Change your program to write out the data with a better variable name - maybe 'data', or 'catalog', and save the file as a Python file, say data.py. Then you can just import the data directly at runtime without any clumsy copy/pasting or JSON/shelve/etc. parsing:

from data import catalog

JSON is probably the right way to go in many cases; but there might be an alternative. It looks like your keys and your values are always strings, is that right? You might consider using dbm/anydbm. These are "databases" but they act almost exactly like dictionaries. They're great for cheap data persistence.

>>> import anydbm>>> dict_of_strings = anydbm.open('data', 'c')>>> dict_of_strings['foo'] = 'bar'>>> dict_of_strings.close()>>> dict_of_strings = anydbm.open('data')>>> dict_of_strings['foo']'bar'