.. _local_data_pickle_tut:

Pickling
--------
All neuron types including :class:`navis.NeuronList` can be pickled. If you don't know what that is: pickling is storing the actual Python object as a bytes stream. This is incredibly fast and works very well for short-term storage but has a few downsides:

1. Can only be re-opened in Python
2. Is (sort of) specific to the current version of ``navis`` - i.e. may not work with future versions of navis

With that in mind, pickling is incredibly easy:

.. code:: ipython3

    import navis
    import pickle
    
    # Load some example neurons 
    nl = navis.example_neurons(3, kind='mesh')
    
    # Pickle neurons to file
    with open('/Users/philipps/Downloads//meshes.pkl', 'wb') as f:
        pickle.dump(nl, f)

.. code:: ipython3

    # Read neurons back from pickle file
    with open('/Users/philipps/Downloads//meshes.pkl', 'rb') as f:
        nl = pickle.load(f)
    nl    




.. raw:: html

    &lt;class 'navis.core.neuronlist.NeuronList'&gt; containing 3 neurons (1.9MiB)<div>
    <style scoped>
        .dataframe tbody tr th:only-of-type {
            vertical-align: middle;
        }
    
        .dataframe tbody tr th {
            vertical-align: top;
        }
    
        .dataframe thead th {
            text-align: right;
        }
    </style>
    <table border="1" class="dataframe">
      <thead>
        <tr style="text-align: right;">
          <th></th>
          <th>type</th>
          <th>name</th>
          <th>id</th>
          <th>units</th>
          <th>n_vertices</th>
          <th>n_faces</th>
        </tr>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
        <tr>
          <th>0</th>
          <td>navis.MeshNeuron</td>
          <td>DA1_lPN_R</td>
          <td>1734350788</td>
          <td>8 nanometer</td>
          <td>6309</td>
          <td>13054</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <th>1</th>
          <td>navis.MeshNeuron</td>
          <td>DA1_lPN_R</td>
          <td>1734350908</td>
          <td>8 nanometer</td>
          <td>7098</td>
          <td>14620</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <th>2</th>
          <td>navis.MeshNeuron</td>
          <td>DA1_lPN_R</td>
          <td>722817260</td>
          <td>8 nanometer</td>
          <td>6582</td>
          <td>13772</td>
        </tr>
      </tbody>
    </table>
    </div>



Hopefully the above has given you some entry points on how to load and save your data. See also the :ref:`I/O API reference api_io>`.