Can PyYAML dump dict items in non-alphabetical order?

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.

If you upgrade PyYAML to 5.1 version, now, it supports dump without sorting the keys like this:

yaml.dump(data, sort_keys=False)

As shown in help(yaml.Dumper), sort_keys defaults to True:

Dumper(stream, default_style=None, default_flow_style=False,
  canonical=None, indent=None, width=None, allow_unicode=None,
  line_break=None, encoding=None, explicit_start=None, explicit_end=None,
  version=None, tags=None, sort_keys=True)

(These are passed as kwargs to yaml.dump)

There's probably a better workaround, but I couldn't find anything in the documentation or the source.

Python 2 (see comments)

I subclassed OrderedDict and made it return a list of unsortable items:

from collections import OrderedDict

class UnsortableList(list):
    def sort(self, *args, **kwargs):
        pass

class UnsortableOrderedDict(OrderedDict):
    def items(self, *args, **kwargs):
        return UnsortableList(OrderedDict.items(self, *args, **kwargs))

yaml.add_representer(UnsortableOrderedDict, yaml.representer.SafeRepresenter.represent_dict)

And it seems to work:

>>> d = UnsortableOrderedDict([
...     ('z', 0),
...     ('y', 0),
...     ('x', 0)
... ])
>>> yaml.dump(d, default_flow_style=False)
'z: 0\ny: 0\nx: 0\n'

Python 3 or 2 (see comments)

You can also write a custom representer, but I don't know if you'll run into problems later on, as I stripped out some style checking code from it:

import yaml

from collections import OrderedDict

def represent_ordereddict(dumper, data):
    value = []

    for item_key, item_value in data.items():
        node_key = dumper.represent_data(item_key)
        node_value = dumper.represent_data(item_value)

        value.append((node_key, node_value))

    return yaml.nodes.MappingNode(u'tag:yaml.org,2002:map', value)

yaml.add_representer(OrderedDict, represent_ordereddict)

But with that, you can use the native OrderedDict class.

For Python 3.7+, dicts preserve insertion order. Since PyYAML 5.1.x, you can disable the sorting of keys (#254). Unfortunately, the sorting keys behaviour does still default to True.

>>> import yaml
>>> yaml.dump({"b":1, "a": 2})
'a: 2\nb: 1\n'
>>> yaml.dump({"b":1, "a": 2}, sort_keys=False)
'b: 1\na: 2\n'

My project oyaml is a monkeypatch/drop-in replacement for PyYAML. It will preserve dict order by default in all Python versions and PyYAML versions.

>>> import oyaml as yaml  # pip install oyaml
>>> yaml.dump({"b":1, "a": 2})
'b: 1\na: 2\n'

Additionally, it will dump the collections.OrderedDict subclass as normal mappings, rather than Python objects.

>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> d = OrderedDict([("b", 1), ("a", 2)])
>>> import yaml
>>> yaml.dump(d)
'!!python/object/apply:collections.OrderedDict\n- - - b\n    - 1\n  - - a\n    - 2\n'
>>> yaml.safe_dump(d)
RepresenterError: ('cannot represent an object', OrderedDict([('b', 1), ('a', 2)]))
>>> import oyaml as yaml
>>> yaml.dump(d)
'b: 1\na: 2\n'
>>> yaml.safe_dump(d)
'b: 1\na: 2\n'