title: Define YAML Mapping Recursively
body: <p>Is there a simple way to define a mapping in yaml in such a way that the value is itself defined within the yaml. E.g.</p>
  <pre><code>alice:
    name: Alice
  
  bob:
    manager: *alice 
  </code></pre>
  <p>So that the value that mapped to the <code>mangager</code> key for <code>bob</code> is the <code>alice</code> object, not a string. So that once the file is parsed I can do something like</p>
  <pre class="lang-py prettyprint-override"><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; data = yaml.load(file_path)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; alice, bob = data[&quot;alice&quot;], data[&quot;bob&quot;]
  &gt;&gt;&gt; bob.manager is alice
  True
  </code></pre>