Can PyYAML dump dict items in non-alphabetical ord

Question

I'm using yaml.dump to output a dict. It prints out each item in alphabetical order based on the key.

>>> d = {"z":0,"y":0,"x":0}
>>> yaml.dump( d, default_flow_style=False )
'x: 0\ny: 0\nz: 0\n'

Is there a way to control the order of the key/value pairs?

In my particular use case, printing in reverse would (coincidentally) be good enough. For completeness though, I'm looking for an answer that shows how to control the order more precisely.

I've looked at using collections.OrderedDict but PyYAML doesn't (seem to) support it. I've also looked at subclassing yaml.Dumper, but I haven't been able to figure out if it has the ability to change item order.

Answer 1

One-liner to rule them all:

yaml.add_representer(dict, lambda self, data: yaml.representer.SafeRepresenter.represent_dict(self, data.items()))

That's it. Finally. After all those years and hours, the mighty represent_dict has been defeated by giving it the dict.items() instead of just dict

Here is how it works:

This is the relevant PyYaml source code:

    if hasattr(mapping, 'items'):
        mapping = list(mapping.items())
        try:
            mapping = sorted(mapping)
        except TypeError:
            pass
    for item_key, item_value in mapping:

To prevent the sorting we just need some Iterable[Pair] object that does not have .items().

dict_items is a perfect candidate for this.

Here is how to do this without affecting the global state of the yaml module:

#Using a custom Dumper class to prevent changing the global state
class CustomDumper(yaml.Dumper):
    #Super neat hack to preserve the mapping key order. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/52621703/1497385
    def represent_dict_preserve_order(self, data):
        return self.represent_dict(data.items())    

CustomDumper.add_representer(dict, CustomDumper.represent_dict_preserve_order)

return yaml.dump(component_dict, Dumper=CustomDumper)