How to force PyYAML to load strings as unicode objects?

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Here’s a version which overrides the PyYAML handling of strings by always outputting unicode. In reality, this is probably the identical result of the other response I posted except shorter (i.e. you still need to make sure that strings in custom classes are converted to unicode or passed unicode strings yourself if you use custom handlers):

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import yaml
from yaml import Loader, SafeLoader

def construct_yaml_str(self, node):
    # Override the default string handling function 
    # to always return unicode objects
    return self.construct_scalar(node)
Loader.add_constructor(u'tag:yaml.org,2002:str', construct_yaml_str)
SafeLoader.add_constructor(u'tag:yaml.org,2002:str', construct_yaml_str)

print yaml.load(u"""---
- spam
- eggs
- bacon
- crème brûlée
- spam
""")

(The above gives [u'spam', u'eggs', u'bacon', u'cr\xe8me br\xfbl\xe9e', u'spam'])

I haven’t tested it on LibYAML (the c-based parser) as I couldn’t compile it though, so I’ll leave the other answer as it was.

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