How to force PyYAML to load strings as unicode objects?

Here's a version which overrides the PyYAML handling of strings by always outputting unicode. In reality, this is probably the identical result of the other response I posted except shorter (i.e. you still need to make sure that strings in custom classes are converted to unicode or passed unicode strings yourself if you use custom handlers):

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-import yamlfrom yaml import Loader, SafeLoaderdef construct_yaml_str(self, node):    # Override the default string handling function     # to always return unicode objects    return self.construct_scalar(node)Loader.add_constructor(u'tag:yaml.org,2002:str', construct_yaml_str)SafeLoader.add_constructor(u'tag:yaml.org,2002:str', construct_yaml_str)print yaml.load(u"""---- spam- eggs- bacon- crème brûlée- spam""")

(The above gives [u'spam', u'eggs', u'bacon', u'cr\xe8me br\xfbl\xe9e', u'spam'])

I haven't tested it on LibYAML (the c-based parser) as I couldn't compile it though, so I'll leave the other answer as it was.

Here's a function you could use to use to replace str with unicode types from the decoded output of PyYAML:

def make_str_unicode(obj):    t = type(obj)    if t in (list, tuple):        if t == tuple:            # Convert to a list if a tuple to             # allow assigning to when copying            is_tuple = True            obj = list(obj)        else:             # Otherwise just do a quick slice copy            obj = obj[:]            is_tuple = False        # Copy each item recursively        for x in xrange(len(obj)):            obj[x] = make_str_unicode(obj[x])        if is_tuple:             # Convert back into a tuple again            obj = tuple(obj)    elif t == dict:         for k in obj:            if type(k) == str:                # Make dict keys unicode                k = unicode(k)            obj[k] = make_str_unicode(obj[k])    elif t == str:        # Convert strings to unicode objects        obj = unicode(obj)    return objprint make_str_unicode({'blah': ['the', 'quick', u'brown', 124]})