When we write YAML files, we generally do something like this:
from pathlib import Path
import yaml
with Path("some_destination.yaml").open("w", encoding="UTF-8") as target: yaml.dump(some_collection, target)
We open the file with the required encoding. We provide the file object to the yaml.dump() method; the output is written there. When we read YAML files, we will use a similar technique:
from pathlib import Path
import yaml
with Path("some_source.yaml").open(encoding="UTF-8") as source:
objects= yaml.load(source)
The idea is to segregate the YAML representation as text from any conversion to bytes on the resulting file. We have several formatting options to create a prettier YAML representation of our data. Some of the options are shown in the following table:
|
explicit_start |
If true, writes a --- marker before each object. |
|
explicit_end |
If true, writes a ... marker after each object. We might use this or explicit_start if we're dumping a sequence of YAML documents into a single file and need to know when one ends and the next begins. |
|
version |
Given a pair of integers (x, y), writes a %YAML x.y directive at the beginning. This should be version=(1,2). |
|
tags |
Given a mapping, it emits a YAML %TAG directive with different tag abbreviations. |
|
canonical |
If true, includes a tag on every piece of data. If false, a number of tags are assumed. |
|
indent |
If set to a number, changes the indentation used for blocks. |
|
width |
If set to a number, changes the width at which long items are wrapped to multiple, indented lines. |
|
allow_unicode |
If set to true, permits full Unicode without escapes. Otherwise, characters outside the ASCII subset will have escapes applied. |
|
line_break |
Uses a different line-ending character; the default is a newline. |
Of these options, explicit_end and allow_unicode are perhaps the most useful.