I have YAML file site.yaml
:
Kvm_BLOCK:
ip_address: 10.X.X.X
property: null
server_type: zone
loaded and then dumped with:
ruamel.yaml.dump(site_yaml, new_file, Dumper=ruamel.yaml.RoundTripDumper)
it becomes
Kvm_BLOCK:
ip_address: 10.X.X.X
property:
server_type: zone
how to retain this null
value in property block
The null
value in YAML 1.2 (constructed as Python's None
) can be represented as null
, Null
, NULL
and ~
, as specified here.
Additionally:
Nodes with empty content are interpreted as if they were plain scalars with an empty value. Such nodes are commonly resolved to a “null” value.
Therefore your null
value is not gone, it is just represented differently by the default representation for null
in ruamel.yaml
when using RoundTripDump
. If you load that output again, you once more get a None
as value for the key property
If that is not to your liking you can change the output for all None
/null
values by doing:
import sys
import ruamel.yaml
yaml_str = """\
Kvm_BLOCK:
ip_address: 10.X.X.X
property: null
server_type: zone
"""
def my_represent_none(self, data):
return self.represent_scalar(u'tag:yaml.org,2002:null', u'NULL')
yaml = ruamel.yaml.YAML()
yaml.representer.add_representer(type(None), my_represent_none)
data = yaml.load(yaml_str)
yaml.dump(data, sys.stdout)
which will dump:
Kvm_BLOCK:
ip_address: 10.X.X.X
property: NULL
server_type: zone
You can get finer grained control by creating different classes in Python (NULL
, Null
, null
, etc. ) and have different representers for each of them (much in the same way that the string
subclasses in ruamel.yaml.scalarstring.py
are used to represent a string in different ways (double quoted, single quoted, literal block style scalar). The problem is that you cannot subclass NoneType
so this is not so easily done transparently as with the string scalars.