Starting with components

.gitignore

/vendor

cars.yaml

cars:
  - toyota
  - nissan
  

composer.json

{
 "require": {
   "symfony/yaml": "2.5"
  }
}

getcars.php

<?php

require __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php';

use Symfony\Component\Yaml\Yaml;

$file = 'cars.yaml';
$array = Yaml::parse($file);

print Yaml::dump($array);

run with:

git clone https://gist.github.com/cordoval/43f9344e43797ec16386 .
composer install
php getcars.php

output is:

~ php getcars.php                                        luiss-mbp-3 [13:21:38]
cars:
    - toyota
    - nissan