How to pickle a namedtuple instance correctly

Create the named tuple outside of the function:

from collections import namedtuple
import pickle

P = namedtuple("P", "one two three four")

def pickle_test():
    my_list = []
    abe = P("abraham", "lincoln", "vampire", "hunter")
    my_list.append(abe)
    with open('abe.pickle', 'wb') as f:
        pickle.dump(abe, f)

pickle_test()

Now pickle can find it; it is a module global now. When unpickling, all the pickle module has to do is locate __main__.P again. In your version, P is a local, to the pickle_test() function, and that is not introspectable or importable.

Note that pickle stores just the module and the class name, as taken from the class’s __name__ attribute. Make sure that the first argument of the namedtuple() call matches the global variable you are assigning to; P.__name__ must be "P"!

It is important to remember that namedtuple() is a class factory; you give it parameters and it returns a class object for you to create instances from. pickle only stores the data contained in the instances, plus a string reference to the original class to reconstruct the instances again.