Warning: This question is a more philosophical question than practical, but I find it well as to be asked and answered in practical contexts (forums like StackOverflow here, instead of the SoftwareEngineering stack-exchange website), due to the native development in the actual use de-facto of YAML and the way the way it's specification has evolved and features have been added to it over time. Let's ask:
As opposed to formats/languages/protocols such as JSON, the YAML format allows you (according to this link, that seems pretty official, or at least accurate and reliable source to understand the YAML specification) to embed multiple 'Documents' within one file/stream, using the three-dashes marking ("---").
If so, it's hard to ignore the fact that the concept/model/idea of 'Document' in YAML, is no longer an external definition, or "meta"-directive that helps the human/parser to organize multiple/distincted documents along each other (similar to the way file-systems defining the concept of "file" to organize different files, but each file in itself - does not necessarily recognize that it's a file, or that it's being part of a file system that wraps it, by definition, AFAIK.
However, when YAML allows for a multi-Document YAML files, that gather collections of Documents in a single YAML file (and perhaps in a way that is similar/analogous to HTTP Pipelining approach of HTTP protocol), the concept/model/idea/goal of Document receives a new, wider definition/character de-facto, as a part of the YAML grammar and it's produces, and not just of the YAML specification as an assistive concept or format description that helps to describe the specification.
If so, being a Document part of the language itself, what is the added value of this data-structure, compared to the existing, familiar and well-used good old data-structure of Collection (array of items)?
I'm asking it, because I've seen in this link (here) some snippet (in the second example), which describes a YAML sequence that is actually a collection of logs. For some reason, the author of the example, chose to prefer to present each log as a separate "Document" (separated with three-dashes), gathered together in the same YAML sequence/file, instead of writing a file that has a "Collection" of logs represented with the data-type of array. Why did he choose to do this? Is his choice fit, correct, ideal?
I can speculate that the added value of the distinction between a Document and a Collection become relevant when using more advanced features of the YAML grammar, such as Anchors, Tags, References. I guess every Document provide a guarantee that all these identifiers will be a unique set, and there is no collision or duplicates among them. Am I right? And if so, is this the only advantage, or maybe there are any more justifications for the existence of these two pretty-similar data structures?
My best for now, is to see Document as a "meta"-Collection, that is more strict, and lack of high-level logic, or as two different layers of collection schemes. Is it correct, accurate way of view?
And even if I am right, why in the above example (of the logs document from the link), when there's no use and not imply or expected to use duplications or collisions or even identifiers/anchors or compound structures at all - the author is still choosing to represent the collection's items as separate documents? Is this just not so successful selection of an example? Or maybe I'm missing something, and this is a redundancy in the specification, or an evolving syntactic-sugar due to practical needs?
Because the example was written on a website that looks serious with official information written by professionals who dealt with the essence of the language and its definition, theory and philosophy behind (as opposed to practical uses in the wild), and also in light of other provided examples I have seen in it and the added value of them being meticulous, I prefer not to assume that the example is just simply imperfect/meticulous/fit, and that there may be a good reason to choose to write it this way over another, in the specific case exampled.
First, let's look at the technical difference between the list of documents in a YAML stream and a YAML sequence (which is a collection of ordered items). For this, I'll discuss YAML tags, which are an advanced feature so I'll provide a quick overview:
YAML nodes can have tags, such as !!str (the official tag for string values) or !dice (a local tag that can be interpreted by your application but is unknown to others). This applies to all nodes: Scalars, mappings and sequences. Nodes that do not have such a tag set in the source will be assigned the non-specific tag ?, except for quoted scalars which get ! instead. These non-specific tags are later resolved to specific tags, thereby defining to which kind of data structure the node will be deserialized into.
YAML implementations in scripting languages, such as PyYAML, usually only implement resolution by looking at the node's value. For example, a scalar node containing true will become a boolean value, 42 will become an integer, and droggeljug will become a string.
YAML implementations for languages with static types, however, do this differently. For example, assume you deserialize your YAML into a Java class
public class Config {
String name;
int count;
}
Assume the YAML is
name: 42
count: five
The 42 will become a String despite the fact that it looks like a number. Likewise, five will generate an error because it is not a number; it won't be deserialized into a string. This means that not the content of the node defines how it will be deserialized, but the path to the node.
What does this have to do with documents? Well, the YAML spec says:
Resolving the tag of a node must only depend on the following three parameters: (1) the non-specific tag of the node, (2) the path leading from the root to the node and (3) the content (and hence the kind) of the node.)
So, the technical difference is: If you put your data into a single document with a collection at the top, the YAML processor is allowed to take into account the position of the data in the top-level collection when resolving a tag. However, when you put your data in different documents, the YAML processor must not depend on the position of the document in the YAML stream for resolving the tag.
What does this mean in practice? It means that YAML documents are structurally disjoint from one another. Whether a YAML document is valid or not must not depend on any preceeding or succeeding documents. Consequentially, even when deserialization runs into a semantic problem (such as with the five above) in one document, a following document may still be deserialized successfully.
The goal of this design is to be able to concatenate arbitrary YAML documents together without altering their semantics: A middleware component may, without understanding the semantics of the YAML documents, collect multiple streams together or split up a single stream. As long as they are syntactically correct, stream splitting and merging are sound operations that do not invalidate a YAML document even if another document is structurally invalid.
This design primary focuses on sending and receiving data over networks. Of course, nowadays, YAML is primarily used as configuration language. This is why this feature is seldom used and of rather little importance.
Edit: (Reply to comment)
What about end-cases like a string-tagged Document starts with a folded-string, making even its following "---" and "..." just a characters of the global string?
That is not the case, see rules l-bare-document and c-forbidden. A line containing un-indented ... not followed by non-whitespace will always end a document if one is open.
Moreover, ... doesn't do anything if no document is open. This ensures that a stream merger can always append ... to a document to ensure that the current document is closed, but no additional one is created.
--- has widely been adopted as separator between YAML documents (and, perhaps more prominently, between YAML front matter and content in tools like Jekyll) where ... would have been more appropriate, particularly in Jekyll. This gives the false impression that --- should be used by tooling to separate documents, when in reality ... is the syntactic element designed for that use-case.
I'm writing a fairly complex YAML document (such as for several Bitbucket Pipelines) and I have a section that is repeated in multiple places. I'd like to use a YAML anchor for modularity, that is, to ensure the section can be easily maintained (without drift or unintended discrepancies between these multiple places).
Does my &anchor have to be defined inline in the first place where the repeated node occurs? Or is it possible to just have a *reference in that location, and to instead define the anchor somewhere separate (i.e., either at the very top or bottom of the YAML file, preferably somehow outside of the node tree for the document, like as for a subroutine called from multiple places inside a main function)? I think this would be more readable in my case, because there would be more obvious symmetry between the lines of config that share the repetition (rather than making the initial instance look completely different from the subsequent instances).
I'm using data from synthea and it looks like most (all?) of the given and family names I'm getting back end with a three digit number (e.g. Gregg522). Is this part of the design of synthea or am I parsing the data incorrectly. A snippet of the json I'm getting back is shown below. If this is part of the design, what is the motivation of ending the name with a number (I would think this would make the data less realistic).
Yes, they generally do. It is sometimes nice to be able to see that the patients are fake/synthetic ones. However, this is a setting you can change: In the synthea.properties file, look for the setting "append_numbers_to_person_names" and set it to false.
I want to write a TIBasic program for the nspire CS CAS which will perform simple finite element analysis. In order to do this, I need to be able to input a non-specific number of variables since the number of members in a problem will vary.
Is there a command or trick I can use to program variables k1,k2,k3,...,kn?
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a way to use multiple variables like that. You might be able to use a list and store all your variables there. Lists can only hold up to 999 elements though, so that'll limit what you can do.
I'm trying to make an algorithm that easily simplifies and groups synonyms (with mismatches, capitals, acronims, etc) into only one. I supose there should exist a standard way to build such a structure that, looking for a string with possible mismatches, if the string exists in the structure, it returns a normalized string key. In short, sometimes the same concept could be written in several ways, but I only want to keep the concept.
For instance: Supose I want to normalize or simplify the appearances of
"General Director", "General Manager", "G, Dtor", "Gen Dir", ...
into
"GEN_DIR"
and keep only this result for further reference.
By the way, I suppose that building a Hash with key/value pairs like
hash["General Director"]="GEN_DIR"
hash["General Manager"]="GEN_DIR"
hash["G, Dtor"]="GEN_DIR"
hash["G, Dir"]="GEN_DIR"
could be a solution, but I suspect that there are more elegant or adequate solutions to that.
I would also need the way to persist this associative structure easily without any database because it should grow as I find more mismatches of the same word or sentence. A possible approach I think is to define this structure by means of a DSL, but I'm open to suggestions.
Well, there is no rule, at least a clear one.
My aim is to scrap from web some "structured" data that sometimes is incorrectly or incompletely typed. Some fields are descriptions and can be left as is. But some fields are suposedly to be "sets" but aren's correctly typed (as in my example). As a human can read that, he immediatelly knows what it means and can associate that with its meaning.
But I would like to automate as much as possible the process of reducing those possible mismatches to only one "string" (or symbol) before, for instance, saving it into a database. So, what I would need is a kindof hash or dictionary, as sawa correctly stated, that I can use to lookup any of such dirty strings to get the normalized string or symbol.
Also, of course, it would be desirable a way to make this hash (or whatelse it could be) to learn from new mismatches in some way and add a new association automatically (possibly it could be based on a distance measure between mismatched string and normalized string that, if lower than X, a new association is built). The whole association (i.e, hash) should grow as new mismatches and concepts arise and, though, it should be kept anywhere (possibly in an xml file, or something like what Mori answered below) for future uses.
Any new Idea?