Question:
What is YAML?
Asked by:
Can someone give me more information about YAML language? Or where can i found more info about it?
Answer by:
YAML Ain’t Markup Language (the abbreviation of YAML) is a serialization language for data designed to be human-friendly.
YAML is designed from its beginning to be useful and friendly to people working with data. It uses Unicode printable characters, some of which provide structural information and the rest containing the data itself. YAML aims a unique cleanness by using minimum amount of structural characters and allowing the data to be shown in a natural and meaningful way. For example, indentation may be used for structure, colons separate key: value pairs, and dashes - used to create bullet lists.
There are many of data structures, but they can all be represented with three basic primitives: mappings (hashtables/dictionaries), sequences (lists/arrays) and scalars (numbers/strings). YAML leverages these primitives, and adds a simple typing system and aliasing mechanism to form a complete language for serializing any native data structure. While most programming languages can use YAML for data serialization, YAML fits best to those languages that are fundamentally built with the three basic primitives. These include the new wave of web languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Javascript.
There are tens of different languages for programming, but only a handful of languages for transferring and storing data. YAML was specifically created to work well for common use cases such as: configuration files(like ini files), log files, interprocess messaging, cross-language data sharing(like XML), object persistence, and debugging of complex data structures.
The syntax of YAML was inspired by Internet Mail (RFC0822) and remains partially compatible with that standard. Further, borrowing from MIME (RFC2045)
Both JSON and YAML aim to be human readable data interchange formats. However, JSON and YAML have different tasks to solve. JSON’s foremost design goal is simplicity and universality. JSON is used from searchbars(top-right corner) for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. Thus, JSON is trivial to generate and parse, at the cost of reduced human readability. For sure JSON data can be easily processed by every modern programming environment.
Sample:
Specification of YAML is here: http://yaml.org/spec/1.2/
Specification of JSON is here: http://www.json.org/
YAML is designed from its beginning to be useful and friendly to people working with data. It uses Unicode printable characters, some of which provide structural information and the rest containing the data itself. YAML aims a unique cleanness by using minimum amount of structural characters and allowing the data to be shown in a natural and meaningful way. For example, indentation may be used for structure, colons separate key: value pairs, and dashes - used to create bullet lists.
There are many of data structures, but they can all be represented with three basic primitives: mappings (hashtables/dictionaries), sequences (lists/arrays) and scalars (numbers/strings). YAML leverages these primitives, and adds a simple typing system and aliasing mechanism to form a complete language for serializing any native data structure. While most programming languages can use YAML for data serialization, YAML fits best to those languages that are fundamentally built with the three basic primitives. These include the new wave of web languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Javascript.
There are tens of different languages for programming, but only a handful of languages for transferring and storing data. YAML was specifically created to work well for common use cases such as: configuration files(like ini files), log files, interprocess messaging, cross-language data sharing(like XML), object persistence, and debugging of complex data structures.
The syntax of YAML was inspired by Internet Mail (RFC0822) and remains partially compatible with that standard. Further, borrowing from MIME (RFC2045)
Both JSON and YAML aim to be human readable data interchange formats. However, JSON and YAML have different tasks to solve. JSON’s foremost design goal is simplicity and universality. JSON is used from searchbars(top-right corner) for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. Thus, JSON is trivial to generate and parse, at the cost of reduced human readability. For sure JSON data can be easily processed by every modern programming environment.
Sample:
--- !<tag:mynamespace.com,2002:invoice>invoice: 123
date : 2008-05-04
billing: &id001
fname : Chris
lname : Dumars
straddress:
lines: |
my street
mytown #56
city : Belgrad
zip : 12345
ships-to: *id123
product:
- code : BL394D
quantity : 12
description : Baseball
price : 451.00
- code : MPH123
quantity : 3
description : Supa dupa
price : 123.00
tax : 12.12
total: 135.12
comments:
Contact Mr. Proper
Specification of YAML is here: http://yaml.org/spec/1.2/
Specification of JSON is here: http://www.json.org/
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