YAML

YAML ('YAML Ain't Markup Language') is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files, but could be used in many applications where data is being stored (e.g. debugging output) or transmitted (e.g. document headers). YAML targets many of the same communications applications as XML but has a minimal syntax which intentionally differs from SGML . It uses both Python-style indentation to indicate nesting, and a more compact format that uses making YAML 1.2 a superset of JSON.Note that the ability to construct an arbitrary Python object may be dangerous if you receive a YAML document from an untrusted source such as the Internet. The function yaml.safe_load limits this ability to simple Python objects like integers or lists. YAML ('YAML Ain't Markup Language') is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files, but could be used in many applications where data is being stored (e.g. debugging output) or transmitted (e.g. document headers). YAML targets many of the same communications applications as XML but has a minimal syntax which intentionally differs from SGML . It uses both Python-style indentation to indicate nesting, and a more compact format that uses making YAML 1.2 a superset of JSON. Custom data types are allowed, but YAML natively encodes scalars (such as strings, integers, and floats), lists, and associative arrays (also known as hashes, maps, or dictionaries). These data types are based on the Perl programming language, though all commonly used high-level programming languages share very similar concepts. The colon-centered syntax, used for expressing key-value pairs, is inspired by electronic mail headers as defined in RFC 0822, and the document separator '---' is borrowed from MIME (RFC 2046). Escape sequences are reused from C, and whitespace wrapping for multi-line strings is inspired from HTML. Lists and hashes can contain nested lists and hashes, forming a tree structure; arbitrary graphs can be represented using YAML aliases (similar to XML in SOAP). YAML is intended to be read and written in streams, a feature inspired by SAX. Support for reading and writing YAML is available for many programming languages. Some source-code editors such as Emacs and various integrated development environments have features that make editing YAML easier, such as folding up nested structures or automatically highlighting syntax errors. The official recommended filename extension for YAML files has been .yaml since 2006. YAML (/ˈjæməl/, rhymes with camel) was first proposed by Clark Evans in 2001, who designed it together with Ingy döt Net and Oren Ben-Kiki. Originally YAML was said to mean Yet Another Markup Language, referencing its purpose as a markup language with the yet another construct, but it was then repurposed as YAML Ain't Markup Language, a recursive acronym, to distinguish its purpose as data-oriented, rather than document markup. A cheat sheet and full specification are available at the official site. The following is a synopsis of the basic elements. YAML accepts the entire Unicode character set, except for some control characters, and may be encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32. (Though UTF-32 is not mandatory, it is required for a parser to have JSON compatibility.) Two additional sigil characters are reserved in YAML for possible future specification: the at sign (@) and backtick (`).