title: How to read a pickled object stored in a json file?
body: <p>Suppose I do the following:</p>
  <pre><code>a_list = [[1, 2, 3], ['a', 'b']]
  foo_file = 'foo.json'
  open(foo_file, 'wb').write(pickle.dumps(a_list))
  </code></pre>
  <p>How can I recover <code>a_list</code> from <code>foo_file</code>? I ran across this in a github program. I have no idea why the author stored the data that way, but I can't figure out how to read it. Thanks for any help.</p>