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disambiguation: If you're looking for Font / Text Object go here

Text DataBlock (text files inside Blender)

Text data-blocks are used for storing all kinds of things.

  • notes
  • scripts
  • data (coordinates, data structures, relationships, etc.,)
  • essentially anything that can be stored as a string(*).

Creating a new text datablock with content is as simple as this:

some_str = "Hello\nMy name is\ngobbledigook"
f = bpy.data.texts.new('new_text.txt')
f.from_string(some_str)

You might find that it can be useful to indicate what kind of data the text datablock stores. Just like variables, it's useful to name the text datablocks in a meaningful way. The addition of the file-type extension is not mandatory, but often it can describe quickly how the data is arranged.

reading and writing json or dict literal

Both methods below work only on dicts that can be stringified, so they can't contain Objects.

json

JSON can easily be constructed from a dictionary and written to bpy.data.texts as a string. Imagine you have some dict of information, call it my_dict. To write that dict as a JSON to the .blend file you do:

import bpy
import json

my_dict = {
  'key1': 'some string storage',
  'key2': ['some', 'list', 'storage'],
  'key3': 5
}

# dump string
m = json.dumps(my_dict, sort_keys=True, indent=2)
text_block = bpy.data.texts.new('my_storage.json')
text_block.from_string(m)

bpy.data.texts['my_storage.json'] would then contain:

{
  "key1": "some string storage",
  "key2": [
    "some",
    "list",
    "storage"
  ],
  "key3": 5
}

to read this back in at a later stage:

import bpy
import json

text_obj = bpy.data.texts['my_storage.json']
text_str = text_obj.as_string()

my_json = json.loads(text_str)
print(my_json['key1'])

dict and ast.literal_eval

here we write the string representation of the dict to an existing text datablock called 'dict_storage'. I've shown in previous examples how to create text datablocks, this shows how to reference one that already exists. Notice i've omitted the file-extention, you can decide whether that's good convention or not. hint: probably not.

import bpy
import ast

mydict = dict(deb=["two", "three"], far="booo", foo=34)

d = bpy.data.texts['dict_storage']
d.from_string(str(mydict))

# read from the datablock
d = bpy.data.texts['dict_storage']
stringified_dict = d.as_string()
my_read_dict = ast.literal_eval(stringified_dict)
for k, v in my_read_dict.items():
    print(k, v)