ruamel.yaml is a YAML parser/emitter that supports roundtrip comment preservation
Project description
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 transformation to tuples
!!omap generates ordereddict (C) on Python 2, collections.OrderedDict on Python 3, and !!omap is generated for these types.
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.
Examples
Basic round trip of parsing YAML to Python objects, modifying and generating YAML:
from __future__ import print_function import ruamel.yaml inp = """\ # example name: # details family: Smith # very common given: Alice # one of the siblings """ code = ruamel.yaml.load(inp, ruamel.yaml.RoundTripLoader) code['name']['given'] = 'Bob' print(ruamel.yaml.dump(code, Dumper= ruamel.yaml.RoundTripDumper), end='')
Resulting in
# example name: # details family: Smith # very common given: Bob # one of the siblings
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
yaml ini <file_name> for conversion of an INI/config file (ConfigObj comment and nested sections supported) to a YAML block style document
See yaml --help for more information on the availble commands
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