CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythondictionaryyamlpyyamlnamedtuple
Carlo
Carlo

Reputation: 151

dictionary | class | namedtuple from YAML

I have a large-ish YAML file (~40 lines) that I'm loading using PyYAML. This is of course parsed into a large-ish dictionary plus a couple of arrays.

My question is: how to manage the data. I can of course leave it in the output dictionary and work through the data. But I was wondering if it's better instead to mangle the data in a class or use a nametuple to hold the data.

Any first-hand experience about that?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 402

Answers (1)

Anthon
Anthon

Reputation: 76812

Whether you post-process the data structure into a class or not primarily has to do with how you are using that data. The same applies to the decision whether to use a tag or not and load (some off) the data from the YAML file into a specific instance of a class that way.

The primary advantage of using a class in both cases (post-processing, tagging) is that you can do additional tests during initialisation for consistency, that are not done on the key-value pairs of a dict or on the items of list.

A class also allows you to provide methods to check values before they are set, e.g. to make sure they are of the right type.

Whether that overhead is necessary depends on the project, who is using and/or updating the data etc and how long this project and its data is going to live (i.e. are you still going to understand the data and its implicit structure a year from now). These are all issues for which a well designed (and documented) class can help, at the cost of some extra work up-front.

Upvotes: 1

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