EDIT: Ah! Shelf depends on Pickle for serialization. Shelf is just a back-end for Pickle. Very cool!
The difference with “dbm” databases is that the values (not the keys!) in a shelf can be essentially arbitrary Python objects — anything that the pickle module can handle. This includes most class instances, recursive data types, and objects containing lots of shared sub-objects. The keys are ordinary strings.
(Pickle) http://docs.python.org/library/pickle.html (Shelf) http://docs.python.org/library/shelve.html
EDIT: Ah! Shelf depends on Pickle for serialization. Shelf is just a back-end for Pickle. Very cool!
The difference with “dbm” databases is that the values (not the keys!) in a shelf can be essentially arbitrary Python objects — anything that the pickle module can handle. This includes most class instances, recursive data types, and objects containing lots of shared sub-objects. The keys are ordinary strings.