demo of yaml anchors and yaml-dump script.

README.md

yaml anchors demo

yaml anchors are:

• useful
• confusing
• hard to google for

yaml can be quite hard to read and see if it is valid.

I use 'yaml-dump' script here to just load a file and dump it as json to more easily see what it loads as.

example

yaml-dump outputs a copy of itself... so that if you paste its output to someone they can see what you did.

user@host$ yaml-dump my.yaml
$ python3 -c 'import json, sys, yaml; print(json.dumps(yaml.safe_load(open(sys.argv[1])), indent=1, sort_keys=True) + "\n")' /tmp/my.yaml
{
 "_myanchors_name_does_not_matter": [
  "this is the content of blob1\n"
 ],
 "key1": "this is the content of blob1\n"
}

my.yaml

_myanchors_name_does_not_matter:
  - &blob1 |
    this is the content of blob1

key1: *blob1

yaml-dump

#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
import yaml
import json

src = "-"
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    src = sys.argv[1]

fh = sys.stdin if src == "-" else open(src)

sys.stderr.write("$ python3 -c 'import json, sys, yaml; "
      "print(json.dumps(yaml.safe_load(open(sys.argv[1])), "
      "indent=1, sort_keys=True) + \"\\n\")' " + src + "\n")
print(json.dumps(yaml.safe_load(fh), indent=1, sort_keys=True) + "\n")