Why is PyYAML spending so much time in just parsing a YAML File?

Question

I am parsing a YAML file with around 6500 lines with this format:

foo1:
  bar1:
    blah: { name: \"john\", age: 123 }
  metadata: { whatever1: \"whatever\", wha         


        

Answer 1

According to the docs you must use CLoader/CSafeLoader (and CDumper):

import yaml
try:
    from yaml import CLoader as Loader
except ImportError:
    from yaml import Loader

config_file = "test.yaml"

stream = open(config_file, "r")
sensors = yaml.load(stream, Loader=Loader)

This gives me

real    0m0.503s

instead of

real    0m2.714s