The quoting that stops a config breaking
YAML reads a surprising number of bare words as something other than text. yes and no become booleans. 007 becomes the number 7. null, ~, on and off all have meanings of their own. Anything that would change type on the way back in is quoted here, so what you put in is what comes out.
Numbers written in exponent form get a decimal point and a signed exponent — 1.0e-7 rather than 1e-7 — because the shorter form is read back as a string by parsers following YAML 1.1, which is most of them.
Multi-line strings
A string containing line breaks is written as a literal block with | rather than crammed onto one line with escape sequences. It reads better and survives editing by hand.
Frequently asked questions
Is my data uploaded anywhere?
No. The conversion runs on your own machine. The conversion runs locally, so nothing in the file is transmitted.
Will the YAML read back as the same data?
Yes. That is what the quoting rules above are for, and it is checked against a separate YAML implementation rather than only against this tool’s own parser.
Something wrong with this tool, or an idea for it? Tell us