What is a correct way to pickle an object from a class with slots, when this object references itself through one of its attributes? Here is a simple example, with my current implementation, which I'm not sure is 100 % correct:

import weakref
import pickle

class my_class(object):

    __slots__ = ('an_int', 'ref_to_self', '__weakref__')

    def __init__(self):
        self.an_int = 42
        self.ref_to_self = weakref.WeakKeyDictionary({self: 1})

    # How to best write __getstate__ and __setstate__?
    def __getstate__(self):

        obj_slot_values = dict((k, getattr(self, k)) for k in self.__slots__)
        # Conversion to a usual dictionary:
        obj_slot_values['ref_to_self'] = dict(obj_slot_values['ref_to_self'])
        # Unpicklable weakref object:
        del obj_slot_values['__weakref__']
        return obj_slot_values

    def __setstate__(self, data_dict):
        # print data_dict
        for (name, value) in data_dict.iteritems():
            setattr(self, name, value)
        # Conversion of the dict back to a WeakKeyDictionary:
        self.ref_to_self = weakref.WeakKeyDictionary(
            self.ref_to_self.iteritems())

This can be tested for instance with:

def test_pickling(obj):
    "Pickles obj and unpickles it.  Returns the unpickled object"

    obj_pickled = pickle.dumps(obj)
    obj_unpickled = pickle.loads(obj_pickled)

    # Self-references should be kept:
    print "OK?", obj_unpickled == obj_unpickled.ref_to_self.keys()[0]
    print "OK?", isinstance(obj_unpickled.ref_to_self,
                            weakref.WeakKeyDictionary)

    return obj_unpickled

if __name__ == '__main__':
    obj = my_class()
    obj_unpickled = test_pickling(obj)
    obj_unpickled2 = test_pickling(obj_unpickled)

Is this a correct/robust implementation? how should __getstate__ and __setstate__ be written if my_class inherited from a class

python pickle slots
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