I'm Jerry Wohlgemuth.

If you want to create a dict like object using UserDict in Python 2 and 3, there's a couple of things to keep in mind.

1. UserDict has moved to the collections module in Py3.
2. UserDict in Py2 is an "old-style" class. This will cause problems if using super.

I ran into a couple issues trying to create a dict like object that is kept in sync with a yaml file. Here's how I made it compatible with both Python versions (not the full implementation here):

try:
    from UserDict import UserDict
except ImportError:
    from collections import UserDict

import yaml


class YamlDict(UserDict, object):
    def update(*args, **kwargs):
        super(YamlDict, self).update(*args, **kwargs)
        self._save()

    def _save(self):
        with open('path_to_file', 'w+') as f:
            f.write(yaml.dump(self.data)

Mixing in object allows you to use super.