YAML

YAML ('jæməl) (see ) is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for s and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. YAML targets many of the same communications applications as Extensible Markup Language (XML) but has a minimal syntax which intentionally differs from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). It uses both Python-style indentation to indicate nesting, and a more compact format that uses for lists and for maps but forbids tab characters to use as indentation thus only some JSON files are valid YAML 1.2. Custom data types are allowed, but YAML natively encodes scalars (such as strings, integers, and floats), lists, and associative arrays (also known as maps, dictionaries or hashes). These data types are based on the Perl programming language, though all commonly used high-level programming languages share very similar concepts. The colon-centered syntax, used for expressing key-value pairs, is inspired by electronic mail headers as defined in , and the document separator is borrowed from MIME (). Escape sequences are reused from C, and whitespace wrapping for multi-line strings is inspired by HTML. Lists and hashes can contain nested lists and hashes, forming a tree structure; arbitrary graphs can be represented using YAML aliases (similar to XML in SOAP). YAML is intended to be read and written in streams, a feature inspired by SAX. Support for reading and writing YAML is available for many programming languages. Some source-code editors such as Vim, Emacs, and various integrated development environments have features that make editing YAML easier, such as folding up nested structures or automatically highlighting syntax errors. The official recommended for YAML files has been since 2006. YAML (ˈjæməl, rhymes with camel) was first proposed by Clark Evans in 2001, who designed it together with Ingy döt Net and Oren Ben-Kiki. Originally YAML was said to mean Yet Another Markup Language, because it was released in an era that saw a proliferation of markup languages for presentation and connectivity (HTML, XML, SGML, etc).