How can I parse a YAML file from a Linux shell script?

I wish to provide a structured configuration file which is as easy as possible for a non-technical user to edit (unfortunately it has to be a file) and so I wanted to use YAML. I can't find any way of parsing this from a Unix shell script however.

Solution

My use case may or may not be quite the same as what this original post was asking, but it's definitely similar.

I need to pull in some YAML as bash variables. The YAML will never be more than one level deep.

YAML looks like so:

KEY:                value
ANOTHER_KEY:        another_value
OH_MY_SO_MANY_KEYS: yet_another_value
LAST_KEY:           last_value

Output like-a dis:

KEY="value"
ANOTHER_KEY="another_value"
OH_MY_SO_MANY_KEYS="yet_another_value"
LAST_KEY="last_value"

I achieved the output with this line:

sed -e 's/:[^:\/\/]/="/g;s/$/"/g;s/ *=/=/g' file.yaml > file.sh

s/:[^:\/\/]/="/g finds : and replaces it with =", while ignoring :// (for URLs)
s/$/"/g appends " to the end of each line
s/ *=/=/g removes all spaces before =