How to preserve order when dumping?

[pcotton-intech]

How to preserve order when dumping?

[pcotton-intech]

In the end I just did this. Seems like a fundamental yaml limitation

    sections:
       0:
          dothis: "{pipeline.spec}/dothis.yaml"   
       1:
          dothat:
       2:
          pauseandthink:
       3:
          dosomething:
       4:
          finishup:

[childsish]

There are two answers to this:

1. By definition, dictionaries are unordered. If you need the entries to be ordered, use a list.
2. It is possible to sort the keys by passing the sort_keys = True parameter to the dump function.

[timotheecour]

@childsish but dictionaries are insertion ordered as of Python 3.6. Using a list instead of dict is not a suitable workaround; please re-open. Most tools preserve dict orderings in python, and the ones that don't just cause friciton

[childsish]

My previous comment was misleading. You can actually provide sort_keys = False to the dump function preserve the order of keys.

The default behaviour of PyYAML is to sort the keys and there's a long discussion (yaml/pyyaml#110) about whether PyYAML should preserve the order by default or sort the keys and whether preserving the order is backwards compatibility breaking. I agree that preserving the original order is the more intuitive option and after much thinking have decided to make the switch. However, I will consider this to be backwards compatibility breaking and change the major version number to reflect this.

I just hope nobody relies on the keys being sorted on dumping... 😬 If you need your keys to be sorted, please use version 1.3.5 (4499770). Otherwise the brand new 2.0.0 will be for you.