Using YAML for configuration files

Python offers a variety of ways to package application inputs and configuration files. We'll look at writing files in YAML notation because this format is elegant and simple.

It can be helpful to represent configuration details in YAML notation.

Getting ready

Python doesn't have a YAML parser built in. We'll need to add the pyyaml project to our library using the pip package management system. Here's what the installation looks like:

(cookbook) slott@MacBookPro-SLott Modern-Python-Cookbook-Second-Edition % python -m pip install pyyaml
Collecting pyyaml
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/64/c2/b80047c7ac2478f9501676c988a5411ed5572f35d1beff9cae07d321512c/PyYAML-5.3.1.tar.gz (269kB)
     |██████████████████████████&...