Keys being renamed by safe_load

[CraigBurden]

I have a YAML file:

criteria:
  sensor: 
    positive:
      accuracy: [-0.08, 0.08]
      range: [0.15, 0.3]
    negative:
      accuracy: [-0.08, 0.08]
      range: [0.05, 0.3]
  power_domain:
    off: [0, 3.4]
    on: [3, 3.4]

When I run this though yaml.safe_load(), I get the following:

{'criteria': {'sensor': {'positive': {'accuracy': [-0.08, 0.08], 'range': [0.15, 0.3]}, 'negative': {'accuracy': [-0.08, 0.08], 'range': [0.05, 0.3]}}, 'power_domain': {False: [0, 3.4], True: [3, 3.4]}}}

Notice the 'power_domain': {False: [0, 3.4], True: [3, 3.4]} in particular.

safe_load() is renaming the keys from on to True and off to False.
I do understand why the renaming happens in the case of a value, but it doesn't make much sense in the case of a key

[perlpunk]

In YAML, keys can also be booleans, numbers and even sequences and mappings.
So pyyaml behaves correctly here according to YAML 1.1.
See #486 for the main issue about implementing YAML 1.2.

If you want to process YAML according to YAML 1.2, try out https://pypi.org/project/yamlcore/ which you can use on top of pyyaml. Then values like off, on, yes, no are loaded as strings.
It can take a while until this feature will be implemented in pyyaml directly.