How to deal with YAML in Python

YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) is a language for reading and writing configuration information to files. It is easy to read and write by both humans and computers. YAML also happens to be a superset of JSON. It uses indentation instead of the braces used by JSON.

• To be able to deal with YAML in Python, install the PyYAML package:

$ python3 -m pip install PyYAML

• Similar to JSON, YAML file can be directly loaded into a Python list or dict, depending on whether the root structure of the file is a list or a dict:

import yaml
y = yaml.load(open("foobar.yaml"))

• Writing a Python structure back to a YAML is similarly straightforward:

yaml.dump(y, open("foobar.yaml", "w"))

• Note that the YAML file is written in flow style by default. This makes it look a bit like JSON. For human readability, it might be better to dump in block style, like this:

yaml.dump(y, open("foobar.yaml", "w"), default_flow_style=False)

Tried with: PyYAML 3.11, Python 3.5.2 and Ubuntu 16.04