Python: How do I write a list to file and then pull it back into memory (dict represented as a string convert to dict) later?

Why not use python pickle?
Python has a great serializing module called pickle it is very easy to use.

import cPickle
cPickle.dump(obj, open('save.p', 'wb')) 
obj = cPickle.load(open('save.p', 'rb'))

There are two disadvantages with pickle:

• It’s not secure against erroneous or
  maliciously constructed data. Never
  unpickle data received from an
  untrusted or unauthenticated source.
• The format is not human readable.

If you are using python 2.6 there is a builtin module called json. It is as easy as pickle to use:

import json
encoded = json.dumps(obj)
obj = json.loads(encoded)

Json format is human readable and is very similar to the dictionary string representation in python. And doesn’t have any security issues like pickle. But might be slower than cPickle.