This is what I've done for a project. I have a few data structures that are bascially dictionaries with some methods that operate on the data. When I save them to disk, I write them out to .py files as code that when imported as a module will load the same data into such a data structure.
Is this reasonable? Are there any big disadvantages? The advantage I see is that when I want to operate with the saved data, I can quickly import the modules I need. Also, the modules can be used seperate from the rest of the application because you don't need a separate parser or loader functionality.
The biggest drawback is that it's a potential security problem since it's hard to guarantee that the files won't contains arbitrary code, which could be really bad. So don't use this approach if anyone else than you have write-access to the files.
Is it reasonable to save data as python modules?