I have a YAML file whose contents look like:
a: 45
b: cheese
c: 7.8
I want to be able to read this information into variables in python but after extensive googling I can't work out if this is possible or do I have to put it into another python type first before it can be put into variables? Ultimately I want to use the values from a and c for calculations.
Generally, there's nothing wrong with using a dictionary as would result from using yaml.load("""a: 45\nb: cheese\nc: 7.8""") -- if you really must get these into the namespace as actual variables, you could do:
>>> y = yaml.load("""a: 45
... b: cheese
... c: 7.8""")
>>> globals().update(y)
>>> b
"cheese"
but I don't recommend it.
globals().update(yaml.load("str: 42\nsuper: hi hello")) will do bad things to the rest of your code; allowing user-defined strings and things into your environment is also a major security concern. So just avoid it ;) @user_hThe issue is in the way your information is being stored. See the YAML specification. The information you supplied will return as a string. Try using an a parser like this parser on your information to verify it returns what you want it to return.
That being said. To return it as a dictionary it has to be saved as
a: 45
b: cheese
c: 7.8
Above is the correct format to save in, if you would like to represent it as a dictionary.
below is some python code on that. please note i save the information to a file called information.yaml
import yaml
with open('information.yaml') as info:
info_dict = yaml.load(info)
First, you need a space after the colon to make it a legit yaml(wiki:searchcolon). For more information about pyyaml, click here.
#pip install pyyaml
In [1]: text="""
...: a: 45
...: b: cheese
...: c: 7.8"""
In [2]: import yaml
In [3]: print yaml.load(text)
{'a': 45, 'c': 7.8, 'b': 'cheese'}
And now you are good to go :)
In case someone is interested in why space matters:
In [4]: text1="""
a:45
b:cheese
c:7.8"""
In [6]: print yaml.load(text1)
a:45 b:cheese c:7.8
