What is the role and main purpose of data serialization?

Data serialization (serialization) allows representing complex data structures (such as objects, lists, dictionaries) as a sequence of bytes or text, suitable for storage or transmission. The main purposes of serialization:

• Saving the state of objects to disk or a database.
• Transmitting data over a network between different systems or processes.
• Caching data.

In Python, modules like pickle (for binary serialization of Python objects) or json (for a text format suitable for exchange with other languages) are often used for serialization.

Example of serializing a dictionary to JSON:

import json

data = {'name': 'Alice', 'age': 30, 'is_member': True}
serialized = json.dumps(data)
print(serialized)  # {"name": "Alice", "age": 30, "is_member": true}

Thus, serialization provides a convenient and standardized way to save and transmit data.