Basic cheatsheet for Python mostly based on the book written by Al Sweigart, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python under the Creative Commons license and many other sources.

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Open a JSON file with:

import json
with open("filename.json", "r") as f:
    content = json.loads(f.read())

Write a JSON file with:

import json

content = {"name": "Joe", "age": 20}
with open("filename.json", "w") as f:
    f.write(json.dumps(content, indent=2))

Compared to JSON, YAML allows a much better humain maintainance and gives ability to add comments. It is a convinient choice for configuration files where human will have to edit.

There are two main librairies allowing to access to YAML files:

• PyYaml
• Ruamel.yaml

Install them using pip install in your virtual environment.

The first one it easier to use but the second one, Ruamel, implements much better the YAML specification, and allow for example to modify a YAML content without altering comments.

Open a YAML file with:

from ruamel.yaml import YAML

with open("filename.yaml") as f:
    yaml=YAML()
    yaml.load(f)

Anyconfig is a very handy package allowing to abstract completly the underlying configuration file format. It allows to load a Python dictionary from JSON, YAML, TOML, and so on.

Install it with:

pip install anyconfig

Usage:

import anyconfig

conf1 = anyconfig.load("/path/to/foo/conf.d/a.yml")