pyyaml and using quotes for strings only

Question

I have the following YAML file:

---
my_vars:
  my_env: \"dev\"
  my_count: 3

When I read it with PyYAML and dump it again, I get the follow

Answer 1

Right, so borrowing heavily from this answer, you can do something like this:

import yaml

# define a custom representer for strings
def quoted_presenter(dumper, data):
    return dumper.represent_scalar('tag:yaml.org,2002:str', data, style='"')

yaml.add_representer(str, quoted_presenter)


env_file = 'input.txt'
with open(env_file) as f:
    env_dict = yaml.load(f)
    print yaml.dump(env_dict, default_flow_style=False)

However, this just overloads it on all strings types in the dictionary so it'll quote the keys as well, not just the values.

It prints:

"my_vars":
  "my_count": 3
  "my_env": "dev"

Is this what you want? Not sure what you mean by variable names, do you mean the keys?