PyYAML : Control ordering of items called by yaml.load()

You can now use ruaml.yaml for this.

From https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ruamel.yaml:

ruamel.yaml is a YAML parser/emitter that supports roundtrip preservation of comments, seq/map flow style, and map key order

My project oyaml is a drop-in replacement for PyYAML, which will load maps into collections.OrderedDict instead of regular dicts. Just pip install it and use as normal - works on both Python 3 and Python 2.

Demo with your example:

>>> import oyaml as yaml  # pip install oyaml
>>> yaml.load('''setting1:
...   name: [item,item]
...   name1: text
... anothersetting2:
...   name: [item,item]
...   sub_setting:
...       name :[item,item]''')
OrderedDict([('setting1',
              OrderedDict([('name', ['item', 'item']), ('name1', 'text')])),
             ('anothersetting2',
              OrderedDict([('name', ['item', 'item']),
                           ('sub_setting', 'name :[item,item]')]))])

Note that if the stdlib dict is order preserving (Python >= 3.7, CPython >= 3.6) then oyaml will use an ordinary dict.