I love YAML. It’s portable. The majority of languages I work with already have libraries built to read/write it. It’s more lightweight, more expressive, and easier to read than XML. I really love YAML.
Unfortunately, it turns out that Ruby’s YAML library is a little incomplete for some edge cases. I just discovered that YAML.dump fails to generate valid YAML for certain multi-line strings. The specifics are very difficult to explain, and we’ll summarize them at the end after trying out some examples. Fire up irb and give the following a try.
require 'yaml' s = "\n Something embedded.\nAnd on a new line." YAML.load(YAML.dump(s))