Python Frontmatter¶
Jekyll-style YAML front matter offers a useful way to add arbitrary, structured metadata to text documents, regardless of type.
This is a package to load and parse files (or text strings) with YAML front matter.
Install¶
pip install python-frontmatter
Usage¶
>>> import frontmatter
Load a post from a filename:
>>> post = frontmatter.load('tests/yaml/hello-world.txt')
Or a file (or file-like object):
>>> with open('tests/yaml/hello-world.txt') as f:
... post = frontmatter.load(f)
Or load from text:
>>> with open('tests/yaml/hello-world.txt') as f:
... post = frontmatter.loads(f.read())
Access content:
>>> print(post.content)
Well, hello there, world.
# this works, too
>>> print(post)
Well, hello there, world.
Use metadata (metadata gets proxied as post keys):
>>> print(post['title'])
Hello, world!
Metadata is a dictionary, with some handy proxies:
>>> sorted(post.keys())
['layout', 'title']
>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> post['excerpt'] = 'tl;dr'
>>> pprint(post.metadata)
{'excerpt': 'tl;dr', 'layout': 'post', 'title': 'Hello, world!'}
If you don’t need the whole post object, use frontmatter.parse to return metadata and content separately:
>>> with open('tests/yaml/hello-world.txt') as f:
... metadata, content = frontmatter.parse(f.read())
>>> print(metadata['title'])
Hello, world!
Write back to plain text, too:
>>> print(frontmatter.dumps(post))
---
excerpt: tl;dr
layout: post
title: Hello, world!
---
Well, hello there, world.
Or write to a file (or file-like object):
>>> from io import BytesIO
>>> f = BytesIO()
>>> frontmatter.dump(post, f)
>>> print(f.getvalue())
---
excerpt: tl;dr
layout: post
title: Hello, world!
---
Well, hello there, world.