What to Do With Long Strings in YAML?

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 15:01:40 +0800

What to Do With Long Strings in YAML?

YAML already defines this. In this case, there are four methods:

|: Newlines under it are preserved as newlines, and the last line ends with a newline.
>: Newlines under it are folded into spaces, forming a long string, and the last line ends with a newline.
|-: Newlines under it are preserved, but the last line does not end with a newline.
>-: Newlines under it are folded into spaces, and the last line does not end with a newline.

In short, > and >- improve YAML readability without adding extra newline characters. | and |- keep the string exactly as defined: if you see a newline in YAML, the string contains a newline.

6 YAML Features most programmers don't know

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 15:08:31 +0800

6 YAML Features most programmers don’t know

There are more examples that are similarly dangerous as Tom Ritchford pointed out

013 is mapped to 11 as the leading zero triggers the octal notation
4:30 is mapped to 270. Max Werner Kaul-Gothe and Niklas Baumstark informed me that this is automatically converted to minutes (or seconds?) as it is interpreted as a duration: 4*60 + 30 = 270 . Interestingly, this pattern still “works” with 1:1:1:1:1:1:1:1:4:30 .

Multi-Line String

mail_signature: |
 Martin Thoma
 Tel. +49 123 4567

{ "mail_signature": "Martin Thoma\nTel. +49 123 4567" }

Anchor

The & defined a variable emailAddress with the value "info@example.de". The * then indicated that the name of a variable follows.

YAML on Ricky

What to Do With Long Strings in YAML?

6 YAML Features most programmers don't know

There are more examples that are similarly dangerous as Tom Ritchford pointed out

Multi-Line String

Anchor