How to dump a string read from a text file into a YAML file without single quotes

I have a string which is a 32-byte hash of a .hex file. It is of the format 0x88f8ad77bb388f63674991a8692618a459bec731d15e6c8cf3755050af98a075. I have to read this string from a text file and dump it into yaml file without any single quotes.

The program I have written in Python is :

import yaml

# Specify the file path for the input file
input_file_path = 'output.txt'

# Read the value from the input file
with open(input_file_path, 'r') as input_file:
    value = input_file.read().strip()

with open('temp.yaml', 'r') as file:
    yaml_data = yaml.safe_load(file)

yaml_data['DataSecurityContainer']['items'][0] = value

with open('temp.yaml', 'w') as file:
     yaml.dump(yaml_data, file, default_style=None)

Expected outcome in yaml file :

DataSecurityContainer:
  items:
  - 0x88f8ad77bb388f63674991a8692618a459bec731d15e6c8cf3755050af98a075

Actual outcome in yaml file:

DataSecurityContainer:
  items:
  - '0x88f8ad77bb388f63674991a8692618a459bec731d15e6c8cf3755050af98a075'

I have tried all possible ways to remove this single quotes but it is not working correctly. Appreciate it if someone could let me know what is the mistake here

Wrap your value in a class with a custom representer. Minimal example:

import yaml, sys

class AsHex(str):
  pass

def represent_hex(dumper, data):
  return dumper.represent_scalar("tag:yaml.org,2002:int", data, style="")

yaml.add_representer(AsHex, represent_hex)

yaml.dump({"test": AsHex("0xdeadbeef")}, sys.stdout)

output:

test: 0xdeadbeef

We must generate a scalar with !!int tag (which is a shorthand for the complete form we use) because PyYAML only writes the value without quotes if it recognizes that loading the value will assign the same tag to it. Since your value is a hexadecimal integer, loading will assign the !!int tag to it, so we must tell PyYAML that the scalar we generate represents an !!int.

I recommend you upgrade to my ruamel.yaml. It supports YAML 1.2, can preserve comments, tags, etc, including the formatting
of an integer:

import sys
import ruamel.yaml

yaml_str = """\
DataSecurityContainer:
  items:
  - 0x88f8ad77bb388f63674991a8692618a459bec731d15e6c8cf3755050af98a075   # scalar loaded as integer subclass
"""
    
yaml = ruamel.yaml.YAML()
data = yaml.load(yaml_str)
yaml.dump(data, sys.stdout)

which gives:

DataSecurityContainer:
  items:
  - 0x88f8ad77bb388f63674991a8692618a459bec731d15e6c8cf3755050af98a075   # scalar loaded as integer subclass

if you inspect that sequence element, you see that it is a special type:

x = data['DataSecurityContainer']['items'][0]
print(x, type(x))

printing:

61953922709457582312898796139505834842512090556466629792920972610962764374133 <class 'ruamel.yaml.scalarint.HexInt'>

To create the required output, you create a HexInt instance, which you can do from the integer constructed from the string
you would read from the input file:

import sys
from pathlib import Path
import ruamel.yaml

value = '0x88f8ad77bb388f63674991a8692618a459bec731d15e6c8cf3755050af98a075'
data = dict(DataSecurityContainer=dict(items=[ ruamel.yaml.scalarint.HexInt(int(value, 0)) ]))

path = Path('temp.yaml')
yaml = ruamel.yaml.YAML()
yaml.dump(data, path)
sys.stdout.write(path.read_text())

which gives:

DataSecurityContainer:
  items:
  - 0x88f8ad77bb388f63674991a8692618a459bec731d15e6c8cf3755050af98a075

And it is trivial to read the string value from a file and create data by loading a file containing a YAML document,
the only 'magic' is in converting value to a HexInt() (and dropping the long outdated PyYAML).