YAML

yaml is a definitive library for YAML, the human friendly data serialization standard. This library:

Supports both YAML 1.1 and YAML 1.2 and all common data schemas,
Passes all of the yaml-test-suite tests,
Can accept any string as input without throwing, parsing as much YAML out of it as it can, and
Supports parsing, modifying, and writing YAML comments and blank lines.

The library is released under the ISC open source license, and the code is available on GitHub. It has no external dependencies and runs on Node.js as well as modern browsers.

For the purposes of versioning, any changes that break any of the documented endpoints or APIs will be considered semver-major breaking changes. Undocumented library internals may change between minor versions, and previous APIs may be deprecated (but not removed).

For more information, see the project's documentation site: eemeli.org/yaml

To install:

npm install yaml

Note: These docs are for yaml@2. For v1, see the v1.10.0 tag for the source and eemeli.org/yaml/v1 for the documentation.

API Overview

The API provided by yaml has three layers, depending on how deep you need to go: Parse & Stringify, Documents, and the underlying Lexer/Parser/Composer. The first has the simplest API and "just works", the second gets you all the bells and whistles supported by the library along with a decent AST, and the third lets you get progressively closer to YAML source, if that's your thing.

import { parse, stringify } from 'yaml'
// or
import YAML from 'yaml'
// or
const YAML = require('yaml')

Parse & Stringify

Documents

Content Nodes

Parsing YAML

YAML.parse

# file.yml
YAML:
  - A human-readable data serialization language
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML
yaml:
  - A complete JavaScript implementation
  - https://www.npmjs.com/package/yaml

import fs from 'fs'
import YAML from 'yaml'

YAML.parse('3.14159')
// 3.14159

YAML.parse('[ true, false, maybe, null ]\n')
// [ true, false, 'maybe', null ]

const file = fs.readFileSync('./file.yml', 'utf8')
YAML.parse(file)
// { YAML:
//   [ 'A human-readable data serialization language',
//     'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML' ],
//   yaml:
//   [ 'A complete JavaScript implementation',
//     'https://www.npmjs.com/package/yaml' ] }

YAML.stringify

import YAML from 'yaml'

YAML.stringify(3.14159)
// '3.14159\n'

YAML.stringify([true, false, 'maybe', null])
// `- true
// - false
// - maybe
// - null
// `

YAML.stringify({ number: 3, plain: 'string', block: 'two\nlines\n' })
// `number: 3
// plain: string
// block: |
//   two
//   lines
// `

Browser testing provided by:

mguella/yaml