How to escape indicator characters i e or - in YAML

Question

In a config file  I have a key to which I wish to assign a URL   The problem is that YAML interprets   and - characters as either creating mappings or lists  so it has a problem with the line  url  http   www example-site com     both because of the colon following http and the hyphen in the middle   Is there an explicit way to escape     and  -     Or would it work to just put the whole thing in single quotes and call it a day

User · Accepted Answer

Quotes    url  http   www example-site com     To clarify  I meant    quote the value    and originally thought the entire thing was the value  If http   www example-site com  is the value  just quote it like so   url   http   www example-site com

User · Answer

According to the YAML spec  neither the   nor the - should be a problem    is only a key separator with a space after it  and - is only an array indicator at the start of a line with a space after it   But if your YAML implementation has a problem with it  you potentially have lots of options   - url   http   www example-site com   - url   http   www example-site com   - url      http   www example-site com  - url   gt -     http   www example-site com  - url   -     http   www example-site com    There is explicitly no form of escaping possible in  plain style   however

User · Answer

Quotes  but I prefer them on the just the value   url   http   www example com     Putting them across the whole line looks like it might cause problems

User · Answer

What also works and is even nicer for long  multiline texts  is putting your text indented on the next line  after a pipe or greater-than sign   text   gt      Op dit plein stond het hoofdkantoor van de NIROM  Nederlands Indische      Radio Omroep   A pipe preserves newlines  a gt-sign turns all the following lines into one long string

User · Answer

Another way that works with the YAML parser used in Jekyll   title  My Life amp  58  A Memoir   Colons not followed by spaces don t seem to bother Jekyll s YAML parser  on the other hand  Neither do dashes

User · Answer

I came here trying to get my Azure DevOps Command Line task working  The thing that worked for me was using the pipe     character  Using  gt  did not work   Example   steps  - task  CmdLine 2   inputs      script          echo  Selecting Mono version            bin bash -c  sudo  AGENT HOMEDIRECTORY scripts select-xamarin-sdk sh 5 18 1        echo  Selecting Xcode version            bin bash -c  echo    vso task setvariable variable MD APPLE SDK ROOT    Applications Xcode 10 2 1 app sudo xcode-select --switch  Applications Xcode 10 2 1 app Contents Developer

User · Answer

If you re using  ConfigurationProperties with Spring Boot 2 to inject maps with keys that contain colons then you need an additional level of escaping using square brackets inside the quotes because spring only allows alphanumeric and  -  characters  stripping out the rest  Your new key would look like this      8 11 32 120 8000    GoogleMapsKeyforThisDomain   See this github issue for reference

[escaping] How to escape indicator characters (i.e. : or - ) in YAML

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