ruamel.yaml 0.3

ruamel.yaml is a YAML parser/emitter that supports roundtrip comment preservation

ruamel.yaml

ruamel.yaml is a YAML package for Python. It is a derivative of Kirill Simonov’s PyYAML 3.11 which supports YAML1.1

Major differences with PyYAML 3.11:

• intergrated Python 2 and 3 sources, running on Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3 and 3.4.
• round trip mode that includes comments (block mode, key ordering kept)
• support for simple lists as mapping keys by transformatopm to tuples
• omap generates ordereddict (C) on Python 2, collections.OrderedDict on Python 3.
• some YAML 1.2 enhancements (0o octal prefix, \/ escape)
• pep8 compliance
• tox and py.test based testing
• currently assumes that the C yaml library is installed. That library doesn’t generate CommentTokens, so it cannot be used to do round trip editing on comments. It can be used for normal processing (no need to install ruamel.yaml and PyYaml)

Round trip including comments

The major motivation for this fork is the round-trip capability for comments. The integration of the sources was just an initial step to make this easier.

Config file formats

There are only a few configuration file formats that are human readable and editable: JSON, INI/ConfigParser, YAML (XML is to verbose to be readable).

Unfortunately JSON doesn’t support comments, and although there are some solutions with pre-processed filtering of comments, there are no libraries that support round trip updating of such commented files.

INI files support comments, and the excellent ConfigObj library by Foord and Larosa even supports round trip editing with comment preservation, nesting of sections and limited lists (within a value). Retrieval of particular value format is explicit (and extensible).

YAML has basic mapping and sequence structures as well support for ordered mappings and sets. It supports scalars are of various types including dates and datetimes (missing in JSON) as a list of YAML has comments, but these are normally thrown away.

Block structured YAML is a clean and very human readable format. By extending the Python YAML parser to support round trip preservation of comments, it makes YAML a very good choice for configuration files that are human readable and editable while at the same time interpretable and modifiable by a program.

yaml utlity

A utility name yaml is included and allows for basic operations on files:

• yaml round-trip <file_name> for basic roundtrip testing of YAML files
• yaml json <file_name> for conversion of JSON file(s) to a single YAML block style document

See yaml --help for more information on the availble commands