Is there a way to represent a long string that doesnt have any whitespace on multiple lines in a YAML document?

Question

Say I have the following string:

"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"

And I think its too long for one line in my YAML file, is there some way to split that over several lines?

>-
    abcdefghi
    jklmnopqr
    stuvwxyz

Would result in "abcdefghi jklmnopqr stuvwxyz" which is close, but it shouldn't have any spaces.

score 60 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 03 '11 at 01:19

60

Use double-quotes, and escape the newline:

"abcdefghi\
jklmnopqr\
stuvwxyz"

answered Jul 03 '11 at 01:19

Jesse Beder

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Single quotes also appear to work, and all indentation (even unequal indentation) appears to be stripped. Thanks! – quornian Apr 23 '14 at 21:36
4

i am using this for YAML in puppet "Hiera" and single quotes does not work, as they do not honor \ as an escape character in RUBY YAML at least. have not tested it with other YAML parsers. – Walid Jan 04 '15 at 10:17
See [this other StackOverflow answer](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3790454/in-yaml-how-do-i-break-a-string-over-multiple-lines/21699210#21699210) for a good overview of all the different wrapping styles in YAML. – Christian Long May 09 '16 at 21:53
2

Single-quotes shouldn't behave like that. From the spec: `it is only possible to break a long single-quoted line where a space character is surrounded by non-spaces.` – Steve Bennett Dec 18 '16 at 23:53
for certain python API operation, using single quotes adds a space in the breakpoint of string, but double quotes works fine... thanks :) – flux0987 May 24 '21 at 11:49

score 28 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 08 '17 at 20:10

There are some subtleties that Jesse's answer will miss.

YAML (like many programming languages) treats single and double quotes differently. Consider this document:

regexp: "\d{4}"

This will fail to parse with an error such as:

found unknown escape character while parsing a quoted scalar at line 1 column 9

Compare that to:

regexp: '\d{4}'

Which will parse correctly. In order to use backslash character inside double-quoted strings you would need to escape them, as in:

regexp: "\\d{4}"

I'd also like to highlight Steve's comment about single-quoted strings. Consider this document:

s1: "this\
  is\
  a\
  test"

s2: 'this\
  is\
  a\
  test'

When parsed, you will find that it is equivalent to:

s1: thisisatest
s2: "this\\ is\\ a\\ test"

This is a direct result of the fact that YAML treats single-quoted strings as literals, while double-quoted strings are subject to escape character expansion.

Excellent summary. Thank you. I just hit an issue where: ``` s1: "url?test=foo&\ more&\ params" ``` parsed, but set evetrything after it to be part of the string, but: ``` s1: "url?test=foo\ &more\ &params" ``` worked fine. Any idea why? — J. Gwinner, Jul 21 '22 at 17:41
I can't reproduce the behavior you've described. You may want to open a new question where you include both the YAML data and the code necessary to reproduce the problem. — larsks, Jul 21 '22 at 17:47

Is there a way to represent a long string that doesnt have any whitespace on multiple lines in a YAML document?

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