python yaml.dump bad indentation

Question

I'm executing the following python code:

import yaml   foo = {     'name': 'foo',     'my_list': [{'foo': 'test', 'bar': 'test2'}, {'foo': 'test3', 'bar': 'test4'}],     'hello': 'world' }  print(yaml.dump(foo, default_flow_style=False)) 

but is printing:

hello: world my_list: - bar: test2   foo: test - bar: test4   foo: test3 name: foo 

instead of:

hello: world my_list:   - bar: test2     foo: test   - bar: test4     foo: test3 name: foo 

How can I indent the my_list elements this way?

Answer 1

This ticket suggests the current implementation correctly follows the spec:

The “-”, “?” and “:” characters used to denote block collection entries are perceived by people to be part of the indentation. This is handled on a case-by-case basis by the relevant productions.

On the same thread, there is also this code snippet (modified to fit your example) to get the behavior you are looking for:

import yaml  class MyDumper(yaml.Dumper):      def increase_indent(self, flow=False, indentless=False):         return super(MyDumper, self).increase_indent(flow, False)  foo = {     'name': 'foo',     'my_list': [         {'foo': 'test', 'bar': 'test2'},         {'foo': 'test3', 'bar': 'test4'}],     'hello': 'world', }  print yaml.dump(foo, Dumper=MyDumper, default_flow_style=False) 

Answer 2

Your output, as shown, is incomplete as print(yaml.dump()) gives you an extra empty line after name: foo. It is also slower and uses more memory than directly streaming to sys.stdout.

You are probably using PyYAML and, apart from only supporting the outdated YAML 1.1 specification, it is very limited in control over the dumped YAML.

I suggest you use ruamel.yaml (disclaimer: I am the author of that package), where you can specify identation separately for mappings and sequences and also indicate how far to offset the dash within the indent before the sequence element:

import sys import ruamel.yaml  foo = {     'name': 'foo',     'my_list': [{'foo': 'test', 'bar': 'test2'}, {'foo': 'test3', 'bar': 'test4'}],     'hello': 'world' }   yaml = ruamel.yaml.YAML() yaml.indent(sequence=4, offset=2) yaml.dump(foo, sys.stdout) 

which gives:

name: foo my_list:   - foo: test     bar: test2   - foo: test3     bar: test4 hello: world 

Please note that the order of the keys is implementation dependent (but can be controlled, as ruamel.yaml can round-trip the above without changes).