How to remove a nested entry from Python OrderedDict (ruamel)?

I'm using https://github.com/wwkimball/yamlpath and the excellent ruamel YAML parser to load and work with YAML files. I need to remove an entry from a YAML file but can't see how to obviously do that. Here's an example:

Source YAML snippet:

sports:
  football:
    - Dallas Cowboys
    - Miami Dolphins
    - San Francisco 49ers

I can get the YAML paths to these but how can I delete (say) the Miami entry? Using ruamel.yaml gives me a data structure like this:

ordereddict([('sports', ordereddict([('football', ['Dallas Cowboys', 'Miami Dolphins', 'San Francisco 49ers'])]))])

I can access an entry by saying data['sports']['football'][0] but how can I remove that element from the YAML file? I see there's a "pop" option but what needs to be supplied in this example for nested keys?

I've looked at the yamlpath CLI tools and there doesn't seem to be a delete option.

Solution

Your 'Dallas Cowboys', is displayed as a the first element of a list, but it is actually a CommentedSeq, which is a subclass of a list that can hold comments and other information.

However, you can delete an element from that, just like you would from any list, using del::

import sys
import ruamel.yaml

yaml_str = """\
sports:
  football:
    - Dallas Cowboys
    - Miami Dolphins
    - San Francisco 49ers
"""

yaml = ruamel.yaml.YAML()
yaml.indent(sequence=4, offset=2)
data = yaml.load(yaml_str)
print('debug:', type(data['sports']['football']), 
                     isinstance(data['sports']['football'], list), '\n')


del data['sports']['football'][0]
yaml.dump(data, sys.stdout)

which gives:

debug: <class 'ruamel.yaml.comments.CommentedSeq'> True 

sports:
  football:
    - Miami Dolphins
    - San Francisco 49ers

If you only have a pop option you would need to pop element 0, so substituting the del line in the above with:

 data['sports']['football'].pop(0)

gives the same result.

I hope either of those can be done with yamlpath