quoting strings composed of digits

Hi, Consider the following program:

import sys
import yaml

w = {'userName': 'scientist ', 'userEmail': '[e-mail]', 'sampleName': '08063075', 'fastqDir': '/foo/bar/baz/171108_M00139_0253_000000000-BHFD5/ProjectFolders/Project_Qux-Wombat-/Sample_08063075', 'analysis': 'Somatic_Run375_MY_DY_08112017', 'laneNo': 1, 'panel': 'Somatic_Panel_Manifest_v4_23_10_2015'}

yaml.dump(w, sys.stdout, default_flow_style=False)

The value for the key ‘sampleName’ is composed of digits, but is a string. When run the program produces the following output:

$ python quoting.py
analysis: Somatic_Run375_MY_DY_08112017
fastqDir: /foo/bar/baz/171108_M00139_0253_000000000-BHFD5/ProjectFolders/Project_Qux-Wombat-/Sample_08063075
laneNo: 1
panel: Somatic_Panel_Manifest_v4_23_10_2015
sampleName: 08063075
userEmail: [e-mail]
userName: 'scientist '

This leads to problems downstream because the sequence of digits gets interpreted as an integer with the effect that when reserialized, the leading zero is lost.

Is this actually a bug? If not, how do I arrange for the value to be quoted?

Version information:

$ pip2 show pyyaml
Name: PyYAML
Version: 3.12
Summary: YAML parser and emitter for Python
Home-page: http://pyyaml.org/wiki/PyYAML
Author: Kirill Simonov
Author-email: [e-mail]
License: MIT
Location: /Users/conwaythomas/Library/Python/2.7/lib/python/site-packages
Requires: 
$ python --version
Python 2.7.10
$ uname -a
Darwin MA41192 16.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 16.7.0: Wed Oct  4 00:17:00 PDT 2017; root:xnu-3789.71.6~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

[ecmonsen]

+1 – I vote to fix this

Or should I say +“01”

[justin8]

@bxnxiong I forgot about this thread.

I’ve actually found a much nicer way to get around this. The answer was to stop using pyyaml. The below code snippets will work exactly like pyyaml, but with the YAML 1.2 spec, so you don’t have to mess with this stuff: pip install ruamel.yaml

from ruamel.yaml import YAML
yaml=YAML()

with open("foo.yml") as f:
    q = yaml.load(f)

there’s no loads/load difference, it reads strings or file-like objects from the same function, but otherwise behaves almost identically aside from complying with the modern standard.