hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3228.txt

Episode: 3228
Title: HPR3228: YAML basics
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3228/hpr3228.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:11:38

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This is Haka Public Radio Episode 3228 for Wednesday 16th of December 2020.
Today's show is entitled, YAML Basics and in part on the series,
Programming 101, It is hosted by Klaatu and in about 34 minutes long and Karima Clean Flag.
The summer is, Learn about sequence and mapping in YAML.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at AnanasThost.com.
Everyone, this is Klaatu, you're listening to Acro Public Radio.
This episode is about YAML.
YAML ain't a markup language.
Well, if it's not a markup language, what is it?
It is a data serialization format.
That's how it describes itself.
YAML is a, is for data serialization.
And what that means is that it is a text format with a specific structure.
We all know that you can have text formats with no structure,
just plain text, type some ASCII symbols into a file, save it.
Now you've got text without structure.
And that works for some things, for beat poetry and for random thoughts.
That works fine for programmatic things that you want to parse and understand and process.
That doesn't, that usually does not work so well.
And it is a lot easier to ingest data into a computer or an application running on a computer.
If you have some kind of predictability, some kind of preset structure.
You can, of course, invent your own structure.
It's not rocket science.
You could list, for instance, a series of animals in a text file
by placing the animal type or family or genus.
I don't really know scientific terms in one column.
And then, delimited by a, I don't know, a space.
And then, list the other thing that animals are called, like their proper name,
their other name, their common name.
So, for instance, you might have penguin space, emperor, penguin space, gen two,
penguin space, rock hopper, and so on.
And then you might switch over to a different species.
For instance, cat space, house, cat space, lion, cat space.
I'm quickly realizing that I know nothing about animals or how they're categorized.
But anyway, the point is you've got this column of an animal type,
and then some delimiting character, and then the more common name for that animal.
That seems pretty simple, and you could do that,
and parse that pretty quickly, probably with cut or awk or whatever you want to use.
And that would work.
That would be fine.
But the problem is that when you're inventing your own schema like that,
you do frequently find that you've not accounted for something.
And so, in the moment, you're thinking, okay, well, I'll just make this up as I go along,
and it seems to be working for the first five, and then suddenly you hit the thing where it says,
penguin space, little space blue.
And now suddenly, your parser, which believes that it delimits each field by a space,
thinks that this penguin is simply called little, because it sees the space
between little and blue, little blue is a name of a New Zealand penguin.
And it throws the rest of it out, because it doesn't know,
it wasn't told about a third potential field.
So, it takes the first two and moves on to the next line, and so on.
YAML or any structured data format that is widely known helps you prevent those kinds of mistakes.
You can, because you learn that schema, you learn that method of serializing data,
and then you use it, and then you are able to leverage libraries and
applications, and other things that other people have developed to help you
parse the data that you've entered, or that you want to ingest one way or another.
That's the main, I think, advantage to, for instance, YAML.
There are other advantages, but I mean, that's kind of just the fact that it exists,
and that there are other people using it is one of the main advantages.
People also like YAML, because it appears to be relatively intuitive,
and that's kind of what I wanted to talk about today.
It's actually deceptively not as intuitive as you think, or said a different way.
It's very intuitive, but the thing that you figured out through your intuition might be wrong.
I'll start then with something that I rarely do start with, which is the wrong way to interpret,
YAML, and I don't generally like to talk about the wrong way of doing something,
because that generally just confuses people.
But in this case, I kind of feel like it's important to get this out in the open,
because when you look at YAML, you think that it looks more familiar than it actually is.
Here's what I mean. Let's say that you've got a YAML file, and you want to list those penguins.
You might think, okay, well, I get the gist, I get the idea here.
I do a dash and a space, and I put an item, and then what I want to, and remember, this is wrong,
and what I want to show a child-parent relationship, then I indent and continue with my dashes.
It's just like a bullet list, right? No, it's not. I'm telling you the wrong thing.
I'm telling you lies right now. Don't listen to me. Don't internalize any of this.
So you might think that YAML is sort of a structured bullet list, and as long as you've done a bullet
list in your notebook, like in a scrap piece of paper, when you're going out to do groceries or
something, you might think that it's essentially the same thing. It is not, though.
If you were to do that, if you were to, for instance, make a YAML file that opened with dash,
space penguins, and then the next line, space, space, so you're indenting now, dash, space,
emperor, next line, dash, or space, space, dash, space, gender, next line, space, space,
dash, and so on. So you're indenting things as you would for, you know, your own little,
if you were going out to the store, you would, you know, bullet point hardware store,
and then under that, you would put a little dash, maybe hammer, dash, nails, dash, screwdriver,
dash screws, and so on. And you would know, when you look at that, you think, okay, well,
I see that the heading here is hardware store, and under that are all the things that I need to get
from the hardware store, from within the hardware store. And then the next heading, which I'll
de-dent, will be the grocery store. And so then I'll put under that, all of the things that I need
within the grocery store, and so on. That's a very intuitive kind of natural way that most of us
have learned how to list things. Heading, sub-item, sub-item, sub-item, heading, sub-item, sub-item,
sub-item. That is not the structure of a YAML file though. So let's talk about YAML correctly.
Let's talk about what it actually is now that we know what it is not. There are, luckily,
you'll be happy to know two data structures in YAML. That's all there are. Now you can embed
those data structures within one another, but the building blocks that you have for YAML files,
there are only two of them. For this process, for this exercise, or when working with YAML,
you want to have two things available to you. One, you want YAML Lint. YAML Lint is, I think it's
a Python script, and that looks at a YAML file and tells you whether or not it is valid. But more
important than that, because you might be thinking, well, I can just throw my YAML file at my
application, and if my application crashes, then I'll know that it's not valid, right? Or my parser,
or whatever. YAML Lint gives you really good description of what is wrong. It tells you,
generally, it tells you exactly what's wrong with your YAML syntax. You can install it with a PIP
install YAML Lint, and that's a double L there in the middle YAML L-I-N-T YAML Lint. So install that,
you'll do yourself that favor, you'll thank yourself later. You'll also need a text editor.
That's how you make YAML, you type it into a text editor, so that's pretty simple as well. Now
there's another thing that I tend to use, which you're welcome to use yourself. It is called
YAML2JSON. This is a Python script that I wrote myself for my use. It's online. I'll link to it
in the show notes. You can use that one, or probably I imagine there must be half a dozen other
ones out there online that you could find. But I do like to use this because YAML, again,
intuitively, you look at it, and it may look to you like it's one thing. But seeing it with the
limiters or rather scope characters to define the scope of things sometimes changes the data structure
or makes it a little bit more apparent. Now that might just be me. It might just be what my
eyes prefer to see, so that may or may not be important to you. But I do find it useful to have
a YAML2JSON parser. JSON is a subset of YAML, technically speaking. I mean, I don't know that
the creators of JSON talk to the creators of YAML. I don't know what the overlap there is. But
when looking at the structure of data serialization, I guess people generally consider JSON a subset
of YAML. But it is kind of wildly different when you are looking at it. Visually, it's quite
different. But the two translate, or well, at least YAML translates to JSON more or less naturally.
And certainly with the Python, YAML library, it's literally just one method that you call or
function that you call. And then you have all your data in JSON. So you can kind of compare the two
and make sure that you're logic and the way that you're sort of thinking of your data is reflected
in the way that you have structured it in YAML. Okay, let's talk YAML. So first of all, YAML,
as I said, two data structures. There are sequences and there are mappings. And I guess I should
really say those as singular. So there is a sequence and there is a mapping. So let's talk about
each one. A sequence is exactly what it sounds like. It is a sequential list. It is a list of items
in a sequence. These items are indicated to YAML by a dash and a followed by a space. So it's a
dash space and then some string or some value, I should say, doesn't have to be a string. That's a
sequence. So in a YAML file, if you wanted to create a list, a sequence of things you could do,
for instance, let's do a emax list dot YAML. Well, now that we're typing, I have to mention that
the first file that the first line of a YAML file needs to be three dashes. That is the, what they
call a YAML document delimiter. When there are three dashes, when YAML sees three dashes all on one
line, it knows that this has started a new record, essentially. Okay, so we've got our three dashes
on its own line and then I'll hit return. And then we'll just do, like I say, a sequence. So we'll do
dash space, emperor, and then a new line, dash space, gen 2, new line, dash space, little blue.
And that's where we'll end it, sort of. Now YAML really, really likes to see a new line character
at the end of a record. So I'm going to not do that right now, just to kind of prove to you how
useful YAML Lint is. And then I'm going to run my new file through YAML Lint, that's YAML Lint.SpaceList.YAML.
And it gives me an error. It says no new line character at the end of the file, new line at
end of file. So there, it's telling me exactly what the problem is. And it's giving me the
opportunity to fix that. So, well, it's not giving me the opportunity. It's refusing to continue
until I fix it. So I'm going to open the file back up. I'm just going to hit return at the end
at the, on the very last line. And then I'll run it through YAML Lint again. And it says that it's
valid. So now I know that I've got good YAML. And that's the sequence. That's a list of items
in a YAML document. That's valid YAML. Looking at it, honestly, it is pretty obvious as to what
that is. We understand that that's a list. But if we wanted to see it in a different structure,
just to kind of really, really drive home this point, we can do a YAML to JSON list.YAML.
Remember, this is that little YAML to JSON converter that I wrote. But like I say, there's probably
a dozen others out there online. And I'll also link to this one. So on this, the output of this
script shows my YAML in JSON format. And it kind of confirms what I said. This is a list,
right? Well, as it happens in JSON, this looks exactly like, well, to my eyes, it looks exactly like
a Python list, square bracket, quote, inferr, quote, quote, comma, quote, gen2, quote, quote,
comma, quote, little space blue, quote, quote, quote, square bracket. There you go. It's a list.
Each item is a distinct element in this simple array. So if I were to take that data and pass it
to something like Python or Java or Lua and say, hey, treat this as an array and give me the, I
don't know, first element, then I would, I am pretty confident that I would get gen2 back. I said
the zero with element, I'm pretty confident I get emperor back and so on. And that's what we want.
So now, just to prove to you that a list is very specific in how it can be structured in YAML,
I'm going to, I'm going to second guess ourselves. And I'm going to go back into this list.YAML.
I've got my three dashes. That's good. We'll keep that. We know that's necessary.
And then now this is wrong. So be, be alert that this is incorrect. I'm going to do a dash
space penguins. So in my incorrect thinking, I'm pretending like this is my header penguins. It's
not. This isn't going to work. And then I'll go to the next line and indent emperor, gen2,
and little blue. So now I've got penguins on its own line. And then indent it. I've got a
dash-based emperor, dash-based gen2, dash-based little blue. I'm going to save that. We're going to
run that through YAML length. It says it's valid YAML. So I guess we're good to go, right? I could
end the demonstration here. Well, no, I can't. So I'm going to do YAML 2json list that YAML again.
And now the data structure looks really different. I've got the square brackets and I've got the
quotes. And inside the quotes, I've got penguins, space dash-based emperor, space dash-based
gen2, space dash-based little space blue. So now my array, my list, contains exactly one
item, which is penguins' emperor, gen2, little blue. That's the item that it contains, right?
So if I said, if I passed this to a parser of some sort or to a language of some sort and said,
hey, give me the first element of this array, it would tell me that there was an index error. There
is no first element. If I asked it the zero-eth element of this array, it would return the entire
string, penguins, dash, emperor, dash, gen2, dash, little blue. So these are not distinct elements
any longer. These, these, as far as YAML and now translated to JSON, as far as those two markup,
not markup languages, data, serializers, understand. This is all one element and that is not what we want.
So a sequence is exactly, it is exactly a single, I guess, column of items, delimited by a dash
space. You cannot just indent things, willy and nilly, as they say, in order to sort of suggest, as
your brain wants to do, is to suggest a parent-child relationship between those items. That's not what YAML,
that's not actually talking to YAML the way that you think it's talking to YAML. So that is one
kind of data element, a sequence. And that is, that's as simple as it gets. It's just a sequence of
items with a dash space in front of each item. Each item is on its own line and there is no
indentation happening here. So that seems a little bit too simple. Luckily, there's another kind
of data and it's called a mapping. So I'm going to emacsmap.yml. Let's do that. And we open with
three dashes. If you said that, then you have learned the first important stage of YAML. So that's
good. Three dashes on its own line. And then we'll do something like, I don't know, penguin,
and I'm just typing, just literally, just, I'm starting with p-e-n-g-u-i-n, and then colon,
emperor. And that's sort of, that's an element. Penguin, colon, emperor. That is a mapping
element, according to YAML. It has a key, which is penguin, and a value, which is emperor. Now,
what if I went to the second line? Well, actually, let's, let's stop there. So I'll go to the
second line just to get that new line character. Remember, I said that YAML really likes those new
line characters at the end. We'll run that through YAML int map.yml. And I get no errors. We'll run
it through my fancy little YAML to JSON conversion program. YAML to JSON map.yml. And I get a
JSON data structure back that is a brace with quote penguin, closed quote colon, and then quote
emperor, closed quote, closed brace. So to me, that looks more or less like a Python dictionary,
for instance. You've got your key and your value. It's a key in value pair. It's a pretty common
structure in, well, certainly configuration files. But lots, lots of different things. You use key
in value pairs, databases, spreadsheets, and so on. That's pretty common. And that's what that
gives you. Now, let's explore a subtlety of YAML, which is, are youably not necessarily, necessarily,
related to this, but it's something that I want to bring up. So you've got three dashes,
any penguin, colon, emperor, and then I'm going to do it in the next line, penguin, colon,
gen two, and then a blank one or a carriage return of whatever it's called a new line character
at the end of that string. Now, I'm going to pipe it through YAML int and it tells me that there's
an error duplication of key penguin is in mapping. So what that's saying is that there are two keys
in the same record. Now, if I pipe this through, interestingly, through my little YAML
to JSON parser or converter, it actually doesn't error out. It just gives me the most recent key
value pair. So I pipe that through and it says penguin, gen two. And I mean, that's not wrong. It's
just, it, my emperor penguin got eaten. So I'm going to go back into my map here. And remember,
I said those three dashes are really important to YAML and that they sort of delineate these YAML
documents as in YAML lingo. They're documents. I mean, they're in the same text file. So to you
and me, it probably feels like, well, that is one document. But YAML, you can separate it for YAML
with these three dashes so that you can have sort of two documents in one file. So I've got a
three dash penguin, colon, emperor, three dashes penguin, colon, gen two, and then my new line
character. Oh, and I think I actually have to close that with three dashes. Pretty darn sure
that I have to do that. Pipe that through YAML lint. I get no errors. And then I pipe it through my
little converter and I get penguin, emperor penguin, gen two, and then null. So that's just kind of
a point of order that you, that any, that any YAML document or if you want to think of them as
records, you, you cannot double up. You cannot validly double up on your keys. There, there must be
unique keys within each record or each document. Okay. So point is we've got this new mechanism
available to us now, which is a word followed by a colon and then a space and then another word or
another value. And, and this maps a value to a specific key. It's like assigning a variable
in a programming language very, very much like that. You're just saying, well, here's, here's a term
that I'll use broadly to represent whatever I need to represent at any given time. So we say penguin,
sometimes we're meaning emperor, sometimes we're meaning gen two, sometimes we're meeting a little
blue, whatever. And we can specify what kind of penguin by mapping that value, the specific value
to this sort of generic term that that we've chosen doesn't have to be penguin. But in this case,
it makes sense that it is penguin because that is what we're talking about. And certainly descriptive
keys tend to, it's very advantageous. So we'll, we'll keep it at penguin, colon, space, emperor.
And that's a mapping. That's all you need to know about mappings to be honest. That's, that's,
again, that's as complex as it gets. The, the, the, now you know, the two data types, the two
building blocks of yaml, you know, sequence, which is a bunch of different lines with a space in
a dash in front of each value, and you know a mapping, which is a key, colon, and then a value.
You're done practically. But of course, you're not really done because in fact, you can use,
these are building blocks. These things are, are building blocks, meaning that you can, you can
combine them in new and interesting ways. So let's say that you do want to list those penguins,
again. So you might have, for instance, in map.yaml, three dashes, and then we'll open it up with
just the word penguin, colon. But then instead of giving just one value, emperor, what if we fed
it, what if we entered a sequence instead? Let's try that. So we're going to do penguin, colon,
and then new line. So no, no value to this key. And then we're going to indense. I'm just going
to do two, two indents. You, you, you can do more or fewer actually indentations. But I think the,
the convention seems to be two spaces, although I don't know, maybe some Python people prefer like
four spaces or something. I'm not sure. But I'm going to do a space space. And then I'm going to
do my dash space to open up a sequence. And I'm going to type in the word emperor. And then I'm
going to go to the next line, which emacs automatically indense for me. So I'll just do a dash,
dash space, gen two, next line, dash space, little blue. So now if you can picture it, I've got
penguin, colon, and then an indented block that is a sequence. I'm, I'm terminating that with a
new line character. Of course, I'm going to run that through yaml lint. I get no errors. And then
I'm going to pass it through my JSON file just so that we can kind of see it in a different context.
And this is exactly what I'd hoped for. So now I have a JSON entity here to, again, to my eyes.
I would call this a dictionary from Python experience. So penguin, well, quote, penguin,
close, quote, colon. And then within this, within this, this bracketed section, or this race,
the curly brace section, I have embedded square bracket lists, emperor, comma, gen two,
comma, little blue. So I have a dictionary element, penguin, colon, some value. But the value is
a list of three different values, emperor, gen two, and little blue. And those are all distinct.
So I could identify with, again, some programming language of my choosing. I could identify the key
of penguin, and then zero in on which kind of penguin I wanted from, from this list of all possible
penguin types. And just to build on this example really quick, we could go back into this file and
and add another key. Like, so we have penguins. And then the sequence of penguins,
Imperage into a little blue. We could also do, for instance, I don't know, demon, colon,
space, space, dash, space. We could do BST. That's the name of the BST guy, right? BST.
And the new line, space, space, dash, space, imp, and then space, space, dash, space,
globretzu. And then in that with a new line, then we can do a YAML lens on that,
just to make sure that we're still valid. Yep, no problems there. And then run that through my
little converter. And sure enough, we've got curly braces, quote, penguin, closed quote, colon,
and then a list of all the penguins, Imperage into a little blue. And then a comma, and then a new
key, quote, demon, closed quote, colon. And then a list assigned to that value, or to that key,
rather, with BST imp and globretzu. So you can have different keys with a unique, with its own
little sequence embedded into each key, all within the same YAML document. Now, if we did that
with, for instance, penguins again, then we would have to make a new document, right? That would
be a different data set. But because the keys are unique, penguin, demon, will to be, or
I don't know what kind of animal a will to be stizz, or a new bovine cow. Are they cows,
bulls? I'm not sure. Whatever. Shouldn't have chosen animals for my example set here.
The point, though, is that a unique key, as long as you get unique keys, you can fill up your YAML
document with whatever you need. It's just, you can't have the same key appearing more than once.
Okay, so now let's talk about embedding, I don't know, maps into a sequence. Let's try that,
should we? Yeah, why not? Let's try it emacsmap.yaml. This time, we're going to, let's make our key
just like animal. And then we'll do a colon's, colon space, colon new line. And then on the next,
wait, what am I doing? I'm embedding maps into a sequence. Okay, got it. So I've got an animal
colon, space, space, dash, space, penguin, colon, emperor, penguin, colon, gen two, penguin,
colon, little blue. Close it with a new line character of course, and then run it through. So
before I hit return here on this YAML, do you think that's going to work? Or do you think
that's going to fail? So I had animal as my key. And then as the value, I had a sequence. And in
each sequence item I had, the key is penguin, followed by the type of penguin. There's no wrong
answer. Well, there is a wrong answer, but you shouldn't fear. There's no penalty for having
the wrong answer. Just kind of think about it for a moment. It is a bit tricky. Well, it turns out,
if you hit YAML lent, it does not fail. It succeeds. That's some valid stuff there. And again,
I feel like, I don't know, from my brain, YAML doesn't necessarily make that super obvious as to
why. I mean, it's kind of obvious now, but when first sort of grappling with YAML, it was very
confusing to me. And it sort of has everything to do with scope. So when you're separating the
different keys with those three dashes, you're scoping out where that key appears. And you're
saying, well, this key is valid here. And then I'm going to put three dashes. And now I can have
that key again with a different value, and nobody cares, because we all understand those three
dashes mean it. We're in a different document. Well, it's kind of similar in this setup where we have
animal as the key, but then we embed a list into that value. So the value of this key is its own
list. Well, that's one thing, but to make it even more complex within that list, we've embedded
mappings, which have their own little scope, because they're each in their own little items.
So you've got map, you've got penguin emperor enclosed in curly braces, you've got penguin
gintu enclosed by curly braces. You've got little blue penguin little blue by curly braces.
So the exact JSON of that, and you can try this on your own if you need to see it to kind of wrap
your mind around it, but it's curly brace, quote, animal, quote, quote, colon space square bracket
curly brace, quote, penguin, close quote, quote, colon, quote, emperor, quote, quote,
close curly brace, comma, and so on. Until you get to the very end, and then you close your
final curly brace, which would be one after little blue, you close your square bracket, which kind
of closes the value out for the animal, and then finally, close the whole thing, the whole document,
which is the curly brace. So I don't know how well that comes across through audio, but you can
try it on your own, and you can kind of see, you'll see why, oh yeah, okay, I get why those
keys can be distinct from one another in this setup while they couldn't be distinct in some other
setup. And that's this underscores, even if you don't sort of internalize what I just said,
this does underscore the flexibility of those simple two little building blocks that you can embed
in one another, and it completely changes sort of the structure or the scope of the data, the way
that the data relates to each other. In one format, you're only allowed to have one kind of penguin,
and then you embed it into a mapping and into a sequence, and suddenly you can have all the
penguins you want. It can be confusing to look at when you're looking at, for instance, an
Ansible Playbook, and you're looking at this thing, and you see name, name, name, name, you know,
you see all these these repeating keys, and you just think, why are these here? Well, they're
there because they they've been scoped into a different data element, and so they're not
interfering with one another. And that's a very important thing to realize when looking, especially
I find at Ansible Playbooks, because you do see a lot of what appears to be repetition in an
Ansible Playbook. And I think mentioning Ansible Playbooks is important in a way, because it also
kind of it exposes the fact that they're there really isn't a right or wrong way to structure
your valid YAML data. So there is a wrong way to structure YAML, and YAML Lint will tell you if
you've done that. But as long as it is valid, there isn't really necessary, I mean, a data scientist
or rather information scientists might very much argue with me on that on that concept, and I would
gladly concede, but in general, like for your own purposes, I mean, there might be optimal ways,
right? But as long as it's valid YAML, you can structure your data practically any way that you
want as long as you have anticipated that in your parser, or as long as you account for it in your
parser. So again, going back to Ansible, which is what made me think of this, there are there are
certain structures in an Ansible Play that you look at it, and you just think, well, wait a minute,
now that is neither a mapping nor a sequence. So why is that valid? And it kind of goes back to
that wrong example that I did where we were mapping list items to another list item, to a sequence,
to a sequence, which is not possible, right? You have to, you can map a key to a sequence,
or a sequence to a key, I guess, but you can't just indent things whenever you want in hopes of
there being some kind of suggestion of inheritance. And the reason for that is, if the reason
that Ansible tends to sometimes allow that sort of thing is because the parser knows that that's
what it's going to get. So in other words, if I go back to the bad YAML example here, which I think
I call bad.YAML, if I go back to that and and type it back through my converter, remember we got
this big huge chunk of a list that is one item, penguins, dash, emperor, dash, gentus, dash,
little blue. Well, as long as my parser knows that I am going to feed it and array that contains one
item, but that that one item contains four strings separated by space, dash, space, then there's
no problem. So I'm saying this because I want you to know that there are no YAML police. They're
not going to come knocking on your door, making sure that your YAML sort of like makes the most
sense and is the most optimal and logical order of data that you could have possibly have written.
If you're writing YAML for your own data from scratch, you're having to think of how you're
structuring it yourself, then go for it. Do whatever makes sense for you and then have your parser
process that accordingly. If you have to adapt it later or change it, you modify it later
because you realized, well, that really shouldn't just be a list. There should be a parent item
there. And of course, you know because you know the two different types of YAML building blocked
data types. You'd know that, well, okay, if I want a heading item there, I need to make a mapping.
And in that mapping, there will be a list. So I need to indent that list under this mapping
that has a key and no value or rather a key and then the value is the sequence that is then
indented. That sort of thing. As long as you're making valid YAML choices, then your YAML is valid
and you will be able to parse it with lots and lots of different pre-written YAML libraries
without fear. As long as your parser knows how to then interpret what you're giving it, you are
good as gold. So that's it. That's YAML. I hope that really does help. YAML, like I say, can be
deceptively simple when you look at it. Then you start thinking about it and figuring out how to
recreate it and you realize you have no idea what the structure is. It looks like you do, but you
don't. No worries. Now you really do. Sequence, mapping, and several combinations of those. That's
all you need to know. Good luck. Have fun. Thanks for listening.
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