strictyaml VS nestedtextto

NestedText already is the way I use YAML; everything is intepreted as a string. I have some trust in my YAML parser to not mangle most strings. I could use NestedText, but users would be unfamiliar with it, and IIRC the only parsers are in Python. But then I could use StrictYaml too https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml

you can stick to a subset of YAML syntax (e.g. strictYAML)

YAML stands for "YAML Ain’t Markup Language" - this is known as a recursive acronym. YAML is often used for writing configuration files. It’s human readable, easy to understand and can be used with other programming languages. Although YAML is commonly used in many disciplines, it has received criticism on the amoutn of whitespace .yml files have, difficulty in editing, and complexity of the standard. Despite the criticism, properly using YAML ensures that you can reproduce the results of a project and makes sure that the virtual environment packages play nicely with system packages. (If you're looking for another way to share environments there are other alternatives to YAML which include StrictYAML (a type-safe YAML parser) and NestedText)

The example you linked provides this as an example of a YAML document that he wants his format to support.

That safe subset exists and is implemented in a number of languages. It is called strict-yaml: https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/

StrictYAML\ (33 comments)

To me those are in the category of "nice to have", and the problem is that every developer has different preferences for these [1] [2]. But the main features of StrictYaml, like supporting comments and less syntactic noise, I think are pretty uncontroversial, and perhaps it's worth it to get people to switch over for those alone. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be a significant enough improvement over JSON, and I'd say those two features are more than enough

[1]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/37

[2]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/38

I used the official reference implementation to make a CLI converter between NestedText and TOML, JSON, and YAML. When generating one of these formats, you can use yamlpath queries to concisely but explicitly apply supported types to data elements.

I'm a huge fan of NestedText, especially as there is no escaping needed ever.

If you ever want to use it as a pre-format to generate either TOML, JSON, or YAML, I used the official reference implementation to make a CLI converter between them and NestedText.

When generating one of these formats, you can use yamlpath queries to concisely but explicitly apply supported types to data elements.

- My CLI converter: https://github.com/AndydeCleyre/nestedtextto

- yamlpath info: https://github.com/wwkimball/yamlpath/wiki/Search-Expression...

In case you're interested and haven't seen it, I've become a big fan of NestedText, which is similar to YAML but without the complicated parts, and without types (just strings, lists, and dicts). The idea is that any meaningful validation and coercion belongs in code anyway. An extra cool part is that nothing ever needs to be escaped, so the content is super clean and unambiguous.

If you want to play around with it, I made NestedTextTo (nt2 on PyPI), for CLI conversion between NestedText and YAML, TOML, or JSON, with a pretty cool (IMO) way to cast value types along the way.

https://nestedtext.org/en/stable/ (not my project)

https://github.com/AndydeCleyre/nestedtextto (my project)

I recently fell in love with the NestedText format, and whipped up a CLI for conversions between it and YAML (and JSON and TOML), so now whenever manually viewing those other formats I pipe it through into readable NestedText. In this example, the result is identical to format A.

So I made nt2 (NestedTextTo) (install from PyPI as nt2[toml] for TOML support).