How to Install YAML in Python

1. YAML in Python
2. Installation of YAML in Python

We will introduce YAML in Python. We will also introduce how to install YAML on different devices.

YAML in Python

YAML is a serialization language. Serialization language means that applications written with different technological languages with different data structures can transfer data to each other through different formats.

The most common and useful format, in this case, is YAML. YAML is a data serialization format for human readability and is linked with scripting languages.

The popularity of YAML has increased over time because it is easily readable by humans.

This feature makes it a great fit for writing different configuration files. Python has its YAML library PyYAML, a YAML parser for Python.

There are different features of YAML. The main features are as follows:

1. It is a complete YAML 1.1 parser.
2. It provides Unicode support.
3. It can also provide pickle support.
4. It has a capable extension API.
5. And sensible error messages.

PyYAML provides support for different standard YAML tags. It can also provide Python-specific tags that permit you to represent different Python objects.

PyYAML can help us to perform tasks easily. They are applicable for tasks that vary from complex configuration files to different object serialization.

Installation of YAML in Python

There are some requirements for installing YAML. We should have the latest versions of pip and setuptools installed.

The setuptools require environment marker support (setuptools with a version greater or equal to 20.6.8), and it is linked with Python 3.4.6 but doesn’t support 3.4.4.

We can install setuptools using the following code.

pip install -U pip setuptools wheel

For our environment (virtualenv, (Docker) container, etc.), before installing ruamel.yaml, it is better to install ruamel.yaml from PyPI using the following command.

pip install ruamel.yaml

After that, we can easily install the PyYAML using the following command.

pip install PyYAML