Is there a way to view cPickle or Pickle file contents without loading Python in Windows?
Question: I use cPickle to save data sets from each run of a program. Since I sometimes
need to see the outline of the data without running the code, I would like an
easy way to quickly view the contents by just double-clicking on the file. I
am trying to avoid having to load a terminal and pointing python to a file
each time, just to run some `print` script.

I looked for Notepad++ plugins but couldn't find anything.

Is there some easy way to do this? Does anyone have any suggestions?

Note: I run Windows 7.


Answer: I _REALLY_ doubt that there's any way to do this since with `pickle`, you can
pack in pretty much anything. When unpickling, you need to be able to load the
modules etc. that were loaded when the object was pickled. In other words, in
general, to be able to `unpickle` something, python needs to be able to
reproduce the "environment" of the program (or at least a close enough
approximation) -- loaded modules, classes in the global namespace, etc ... In
general, this isn't possible without some help from the user. Consider:

    
    
    import pickle
    class Foo(object): pass
    
    a = Foo()
    with open('data.pickle','wb') as f:
        pickle.dump(a,f)
    

Now if you try to restore this in a separate script, python has no way of
knowing what a `Foo` looks like and so it can't restore the object (unless you
define an suitable `Foo` object in that script). This isn't really a process
that can be done without some human intervention.

Of course, an arguably useful special case where you're just pickling builtin
objects and things from the standard library might be able to be attempted ...
but I don't think you could write a general unpickler extension.

