Reading YAML file with Python results in AttributeError

Question

I'm trying to make a script to back up a MySQL database. I have a config.yml file:

DB_HOST :'localhost'
DB_USER : 'root'
DB_USER_PASSWORD:'P@$$w0rd'
DB_NAME : 'moodle_data'
BACKUP_PATH : '/var/lib/mysql/moodle_data'

Now I need to read this file. My Python code so far:

import yaml
config = yaml.load(open('config.yml'))
print(config.DB_NAME)

And this is an error that comes up:

file "conf.py", line 4, in <module>
print(config.DB_NAME)
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'DB_NAME'

Does anyone have an idea where I made a mistake?

Answer 1

There are 2 issues:

• As others have said, yaml.load() loads associative arrays as mappings, so you need to use config['DB_NAME'].
• The syntax in your config file is not correct: in YAML, keys are separated from values by a colon+space.

Should work if the file is formatted like this:

DB_HOST: 'localhost'
DB_USER: 'root'
DB_USER_PASSWORD: 'P@$$w0rd'
DB_NAME: 'moodle_data'
BACKUP_PATH: '/var/lib/mysql/moodle_data'