Python's cPickle deserialization from PHP?

If you want to share data objects between programs written in different languages, it might be easier to serialize/deserialize using something like JSON instead. Most major programming languages have a JSON library.

Can you do a system call? You could use a python script like this to convert the pickle data into json:

# pickle2json.pyimport sys, optparse, cPickle, ostry:    import jsonexcept:    import simplejson as json# Setup the arguments this script can accept from the command lineparser = optparse.OptionParser()parser.add_option('-p','--pickled_data_path',dest="pickled_data_path",type="string",help="Path to the file containing pickled data.")parser.add_option('-j','--json_data_path',dest="json_data_path",type="string",help="Path to where the json data should be saved.")opts,args=parser.parse_args()# Load in the pickled data from either a file or the standard input streamif opts.pickled_data_path:    unpickled_data = cPickle.loads(open(opts.pickled_data_path).read())else:    unpickled_data = cPickle.loads(sys.stdin.read())# Output the json version of the data either to another file or to the standard outputif opts.json_data_path:    open(opts.json_data_path, 'w').write(json.dumps(unpickled_data))else:    print json.dumps(unpickled_data)

This way, if your getting the data from a file you could do something like this:

<?php    exec("python pickle2json.py -p pickled_data.txt", $json_data = array());?>

or if you want to save it out to a file this:

<?php    system("python pickle2json.py -p pickled_data.txt -j p_to_j.json");?>

All the code above probably isn't perfect (I'm not a PHP developer), but would something like this work for you?

If the pickle is being created by the the code that you showed, then it won't contain binary data -- unless you are calling newlines "binary data". See the Python docs. Following code was run by Python 2.6.

>>> import cPickle>>> data = {'user_id': 5}>>> for protocol in (0, 1, 2): # protocol 0 is the default...     print protocol, repr(cPickle.dumps(data, protocol))...0 "(dp1\nS'user_id'\np2\nI5\ns."1 '}q\x01U\x07user_idq\x02K\x05s.'2 '\x80\x02}q\x01U\x07user_idq\x02K\x05s.'>>>

Which of the above looks most like what you are seeing? Can you post the pickled file contents as displayed by a hex editor/dumper or whatever is the PHP equivalent of Python's repr()? How many items in a typical dictionary? What data types other than "integer" and "string of 8-bit bytes" (what encoding?)?