How to install Python YAML module on Ubuntu?

YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language) is a human-readable data serialization format. It is commonly used for configuration files and data exchange between programming languages. In Python, you can work with YAML files using the PyYAML library, which provides a convenient interface for parsing and generating YAML data.

To use PyYAML, you need to install it first. You can install it via pip by running the following command:

pip3 install pyyaml

Once installed, you can start working with YAML files in your Python code. Here’s an example of how to load and parse a YAML file.

Related: Python YAML Practical Examples

YAML Python ( pyyaml ) Example code

import yaml

# Load YAML data from a file
with open('data.yaml') as file:
    data = yaml.load(file, Loader=yaml.FullLoader)

# Access data
print(data['key1'])
print(data['key2'])

# Modify data
data['key1'] = 'new value'

# Save data to a YAML file
with open('data.yaml', 'w') as file:
    yaml.dump(data, file)

In the example above, the yaml.load() function is used to parse the YAML data from a file. The yaml.dump() function returns the modified data to a YAML file.

Note: In PyYAML, the yaml.load() function is potentially unsafe if you’re loading untrusted YAML data. It can execute arbitrary Python code. To mitigate this risk, use yaml.safe_load() instead.

Related reading: Python YAML Examples

How to steps covered in this article: PyYAML install Ubuntu