Simple YAML parser wrapper with extensions

This simply wraps the js-yaml package providing a parse(...) convenience method to parse files synchronously, and adding a couple of useful tags.

Usage

Very simply:

const { parse } = require('@koerber/yaml')
let parsed = parse('my_file.yml')

An optional second argument to the parse(...) function allows to specify the base schema for parsing (defaulting to DEFAULT_SAFE_SCHEMA).

The module also exposes dump(...) as an alias to js-yaml's safeDump(...).

The !include tag

The !include tag will include another YAML file in the current one. For example:

object:
  <<: !include other.yml

Given the contents of other.yml as:

foo: bar

And noting the use of the <<: merging tag in this example, the resulting parsed JSON will be:

"object" {
  "foo": "bar"
}

The !include tag can be used also in included documents, and will resolve file names relative to the real path of the document where the tag is specified (in other words, symlinks are followed).

The !merge tag

The !merge tag merges arrays of arrays into one single array. For example:

array: !merge
  -
    - one
    - two
  -
    - three
    - four
  - five
  -
    - six
    - seven

Will be parsed as the following JSON:

{
  "array": [
    "one",
    "two",
    "three",
    "four",
    "five",
    "six",
    "seven"
  ]
}

This is quite useful when used with references where a file like the following:

base: &base
  - a
  - b
merged: !merge
  - *base
  - c

Will be parsed as the following JSON:

{
  "base": [ "a", "b" ],
  "merged": [ "a", "b", "c" ]
}

Ultimately, this can also be used in conjunction with !include whereas:

!merge
- !include other.yml
- baz

Given the following contents for other.yml:

- foo
- bar

Will be parsed as the following JSON:

[ "foo", "bar", "baz" ]

The !join tag

The !join tag joins array members into a string. For example:

joined: !join
  - One
  - Two
  - Three

Will be parsed as the following JSON:

{ "joined": "OneTwoThree" }

The same output can be expected for the following YAML syntax:

joined: !join [ One, Two, Three ]

License

This work is licensed under the MIT License Agreement