CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsyaml
Blankman
Blankman

Reputation: 267140

Yaml gotcha's, are there any issues with storing certain types of characters in Yaml?

I'm very new to yaml, and I just want to know what I can and can't store character wise in yaml?

What are the escape characters for double quotes etc?

Can I span multiple lines?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 576

Answers (1)

user395760
user395760

Reputation:

Basically, you can store everything. Quotes aren't an issue, you can type text out without quotes (and for non-printable characters that you can't incorporate casually, there are the usual escape sequences). That means purely numerical text is considered a number, though - but then again, you can add quotes or an explicit type annotation (and I assume most libraries do that when necessary), e.g. !!str 100. Also, if you want to include the comment sign (#), you have to add quotes.

Another issue is that some strings may look like more complex YAML (e.g. certain uses of exclamation signs look like casts and certain uses of colons look like singleton associative tables). You can avoid these by using "multi-line" strings that just consist of a single line. Multi-line strings exist and come in two flavors, preserving linebreaks (--- |) and ignoring newlines except for blank lines (--- >, much like markdown).

Upvotes: 2

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