18 Facts About YAML

YAML is a human-readable data-serialization language.

YAML is intended to be read and written in streams, a feature inspired by SAX.

YAML was first proposed by Clark Evans in 2001, who designed it together with Ingy dot Net and Oren Ben-Kiki.

Originally YAML was said to mean Yet Another Markup Language, because it was released in an era that saw a proliferation of markup languages for presentation and connectivity.

YAML primarily relies on outline indentation for structure, it is especially resistant to delimiter collision.

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Unlike JSON, which can only represent data in a hierarchical model with each child node having a single parent, YAML offers a simple relational scheme that allows repeats of identical data to be referenced from two or more points in the tree rather than entered redundantly at those points.

YAML is line-oriented and thus it is often simple to convert the unstructured output of existing programs into YAML format while having them retain much of the look of the original document.

Likewise, the whitespace delimiters facilitate quick-and-dirty filtering of YAML files using the line-oriented commands in grep, AWK, Perl, Ruby, and Python.

YAML is purely a data-representation language and thus has no executable commands.

However, YAML allows language-specific tags so that arbitrary local objects can be created by a parser that supports those tags.

PyYAML allows you to construct a Python object of any type.

YAML specification identifies an instance document as a "Presentation" or "character stream".

The YAML specification indicates some basic constraints that apply to these primary logical structures.

Finally, the YAML specification defines an information model or "representation graph", which must be created during processing for both dump and load operations, although this representation need not be made available to the user through an API.

YAML has many additional features lacking in JSON, including comments, extensible data types, relational anchors, strings without quotation marks, and mapping types preserving key order.

The YAML specification was pointed out to have 23,449 words, while the TOML specification had only 3,339 words.

YAML lacks the notion of tag attributes that are found in XML.

YAML makes this easy, since this simply requires splitting on the document end marker, which is defined as three periods at the start of a line followed by a whitespace.