YAML::Tiny(phpman.html) - phpMan

YAML::Tiny(3)         User Contributed Perl Documentation        YAML::Tiny(3)

NAME
       YAML::Tiny - Read/Write YAML files with as little code as possible
PREAMBLE
       The YAML specification is huge. Really, really huge. It contains all
       the functionality of XML, except with flexibility and choice, which
       makes it easier to read, but with a formal specification that is more
       complex than XML.
       The original pure-Perl implementation YAML costs just over 4 megabytes
       of memory to load. Just like with Windows .ini files (3 meg to load)
       and CSS (3.5 meg to load) the situation is just asking for a YAML::Tiny
       module, an incomplete but correct and usable subset of the
       functionality, in as little code as possible.
       Like the other "::Tiny" modules, YAML::Tiny has no non-core
       dependencies, does not require a compiler to install, is back-
       compatible to Perl 5.004, and can be inlined into other modules if
       needed.
       In exchange for this adding this extreme flexibility, it provides
       support for only a limited subset of YAML. But the subset supported
       contains most of the features for the more common usese of YAML.
SYNOPSIS
           #############################################
           # In your file
           ---
           rootproperty: blah
           section:
             one: two
             three: four
             Foo: Bar
             empty: ~

           #############################################
           # In your program
           use YAML::Tiny;
           # Create a YAML file
           my $yaml = YAML::Tiny->new;
           # Open the config
           $yaml = YAML::Tiny->read( 'file.yml' );
           # Reading properties
           my $root = $yaml->[0]->{rootproperty};
           my $one  = $yaml->[0]->{section}->{one};
           my $Foo  = $yaml->[0]->{section}->{Foo};
           # Changing data
           $yaml->[0]->{newsection} = { this => 'that' }; # Add a section
           $yaml->[0]->{section}->{Foo} = 'Not Bar!';     # Change a value
           delete $yaml->[0]->{section};                  # Delete a value
           # Add an entire document
           $yaml->[1] = [ 'foo', 'bar', 'baz' ];
           # Save the file
           $yaml->write( 'file.conf' );
DESCRIPTION
       YAML::Tiny is a perl class for reading and writing YAML-style files,
       written with as little code as possible, reducing load time and memory
       overhead.
       Most of the time it is accepted that Perl applications use a lot of
       memory and modules. The ::Tiny family of modules is specifically
       intended to provide an ultralight and zero-dependency alternative to
       many more-thorough standard modules.
       This module is primarily for reading human-written files (like simple
       config files) and generating very simple human-readable files. Note
       that I said human-readable and not geek-readable. The sort of files
       that your average manager or secretary should be able to look at and
       make sense of.
       YAML::Tiny does not generate comments, it won't necesarily preserve the
       order of your hashes, and it will normalise if reading in and writing
       out again.
       It only supports a very basic subset of the full YAML specification.
       Usage is targetted at files like Perl's META.yml, for which a small and
       easily-embeddable module is extremely attractive.
       Features will only be added if they are human readable, and can be
       written in a few lines of code. Please don't be offended if your
       request is refused. Someone has to draw the line, and for YAML::Tiny
       that someone is me.
       If you need something with more power move up to YAML (4 megabytes of
       memory overhead) or YAML::Syck (275k, but requires libsyck and a C
       compiler).
       To restate, YAML::Tiny does not preserve your comments, whitespace, or
       the order of your YAML data. But it should round-trip from Perl
       structure to file and back again just fine.
YAML TINY SPECIFICATION
       This section of the documentation provides a specification for "YAML
       Tiny", a subset of the YAML specification.
       It is based on and described comparatively to the YAML 1.1 Working
       Draft 2004-12-28 specification, located at
       <http://yaml.org/spec/current.html>;.
       Terminology and chapter numbers are based on that specification.
   1. Introduction and Goals
       The purpose of the YAML Tiny specification is to describe a useful
       subset of the YAML specification that can be used for typical document-
       oriented use cases such as configuration files and simple data
       structure dumps.
       Many specification elements that add flexibility or extensibility are
       intentionally removed, as is support for complex datastructures, class
       and object-orientation.
       In general, the YAML Tiny language targets only those data structures
       available in JSON, with the additional limitation that only simple keys
       are supported.
       As a result, all possible YAML Tiny documents should be able to be
       transformed into an equivalent JSON document, although the reverse is
       not necesarily true (but will be true in simple cases).
       As a result of these simplifications the YAML Tiny specification should
       be implementable in a (relatively) small amount of code in any language
       that supports Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE).
   2. Introduction
       YAML Tiny supports three data structures. These are scalars (in a
       variety of forms), block-form sequences and block-form mappings. Flow-
       style sequences and mappings are not supported, with some minor
       exceptions detailed later.
       The use of three dashes "---" to indicate the start of a new document
       is supported, and multiple documents per file/stream is allowed.
       Both line and inline comments are supported.
       Scalars are supported via the plain style, single quote and double
       quote, as well as literal-style and folded-style multi-line scalars.
       The use of explicit tags is not supported.
       The use of "null" type scalars is supported via the ~ character.
       The use of "bool" type scalars is not supported.
       However, serializer implementations should take care to explicitly
       escape strings that match a "bool" keyword in the following set to
       prevent other implementations that do support "bool" accidentally
       reading a string as a boolean
         y|Y|yes|Yes|YES|n|N|no|No|NO
         |true|True|TRUE|false|False|FALSE
         |on|On|ON|off|Off|OFF
       The use of anchors and aliases is not supported.
       The use of directives is supported only for the %YAML directive.
   3. Processing YAML Tiny Information
       Processes
       The YAML specification dictates three-phase serialization and three-
       phase deserialization.
       The YAML Tiny specification does not mandate any particular methodology
       or mechanism for parsing.
       Any compliant parser is only required to parse a single document at a
       time. The ability to support streaming documents is optional and most
       likely non-typical.
       Because anchors and aliases are not supported, the resulting
       representation graph is thus directed but (unlike the main YAML
       specification) acyclic.
       Circular references/pointers are not possible, and any YAML Tiny
       serializer detecting a circular reference should error with an
       appropriate message.
       Presentation Stream
       YAML Tiny is notionally unicode, but support for unicode is required if
       the underlying language or system being used to implement a parser does
       not support Unicode. If unicode is encountered in this case an error
       should be returned.
       Loading Failure Points
       YAML Tiny parsers and emitters are not expected to recover from adapt
       to errors. The specific error modality of any implementation is not
       dictated (return codes, exceptions, etc) but is expected to be
       consistant.
   4. Syntax
       Character Set
       YAML Tiny streams are implemented primarily using the ASCII character
       set, although the use of Unicode inside strings is allowed if support
       by the implementation.
       Specific YAML Tiny encoded document types aiming for maximum
       compatibility should restrict themselves to ASCII.
       The escaping and unescaping of the 8-bit YAML escapes is required.
       The escaping and unescaping of 16-bit and 32-bit YAML escapes is not
       required.
       Indicator Characters
       Support for the "~" null/undefined indicator is required.
       Implementations may represent this as appropriate for the underlying
       language.
       Support for the "-" block sequence indicator is required.
       Support for the "?" mapping key indicator is not required.
       Support for the ":" mapping value indicator is required.
       Support for the "," flow collection indicator is not required.
       Support for the "[" flow sequence indicator is not required, with one
       exception (detailed below).
       Support for the "]" flow sequence indicator is not required, with one
       exception (detailed below).
       Support for the "{" flow mapping indicator is not required, with one
       exception (detailed below).
       Support for the "}" flow mapping indicator is not required, with one
       exception (detailed below).
       Support for the "#" comment indicator is required.
       Support for the "&" anchor indicator is not required.
       Support for the "*" alias indicator is not required.
       Support for the "!" tag indicator is not required.
       Support for the "|" literal block indicator is required.
       Support for the ">" folded block indicator is required.
       Support for the "'" single quote indicator is required.
       Support for the """ double quote indicator is required.
       Support for the "%" directive indicator is required, but only for the
       special case of a %YAML version directive before the "---" document
       header, or on the same line as the document header.
       For example:
         %YAML 1.1
         ---
         - A sequence with a single element
       Special Exception:
       To provide the ability to support empty sequences and mappings, support
       for the constructs [] (empty sequence) and {} (empty mapping) are
       required.
       For example,
         %YAML 1.1
         # A document consisting of only an empty mapping
         --- {}
         # A document consisting of only an empty sequence
         --- []
         # A document consisting of an empty mapping within a sequence
         - foo
         - {}
         - bar
       Syntax Primitives
       Other than the empty sequence and mapping cases described above, YAML
       Tiny supports only the indentation-based block-style group of contexts.
       All five scalar contexts are supported.
       Indentation spaces work as per the YAML specification in all cases.
       Comments work as per the YAML specification in all simple cases.
       Support for indented multi-line comments is not required.
       Seperation spaces work as per the YAML specification in all cases.
       YAML Tiny Character Stream
       The only directive supported by the YAML Tiny specification is the
       %YAML language/version identifier. Although detected, this directive
       will have no control over the parsing itself.
       The parser must recognise both the YAML 1.0 and YAML 1.1+ formatting of
       this directive (as well as the commented form, although no explicit
       code should be needed to deal with this case, being a comment anyway)
       That is, all of the following should be supported.
         --- #YAML:1.0
         - foo
         %YAML:1.0
         ---
         - foo
         % YAML 1.1
         ---
         - foo
       Support for the %TAG directive is not required.
       Support for additional directives is not required.
       Support for the document boundary marker "---" is required.
       Support for the document boundary market "..." is not required.
       If necesary, a document boundary should simply by indicated with a
       "---" marker, with not preceding "..." marker.
       Support for empty streams (containing no documents) is required.
       Support for implicit document starts is required.
       That is, the following must be equivalent.
        # Full form
        %YAML 1.1
        ---
        foo: bar
        # Implicit form
        foo: bar
       Nodes
       Support for nodes optional anchor and tag properties are not required.
       Support for node anchors is not required.
       Support for node tags is not required.
       Support for alias nodes is not required.
       Support for flow nodes is not required.
       Support for block nodes is required.
       Scalar Styles
       Support for all five scalar styles are required as per the YAML
       specification, although support for quoted scalars spanning more than
       one line is not required.
       Support for the chomping indicators on multi-line scalar styles is
       required.
       Collection Styles
       Support for block-style sequences is required.
       Support for flow-style sequences is not required.
       Support for block-style mappings is required.
       Support for flow-style mappings is not required.
       Both sequences and mappings should be able to be arbitrarily nested.
       Support for plain-style mapping keys is required.
       Support for quoted keys in mappings is not required.
       Support for "?"-indicated explicit keys is not required.
       Here endeth the specification.
   Additional Perl-Specific Notes
       For some Perl applications, it's important to know if you really have a
       number and not a string.
       That is, in some contexts is important that 3 the number is distinctive
       from "3" the string.
       Because even Perl itself is not trivially able to understand the
       difference (certainly without XS-based modules) Perl implementations of
       the YAML Tiny specification are not required to retain the
       distinctiveness of 3 vs "3".
METHODS
   new
       The constructor "new" creates and returns an empty "YAML::Tiny" object.
   read $filename
       The "read" constructor reads a YAML file from a file name, and returns
       a new "YAML::Tiny" object containing the parsed content.
       Returns the object on success, or "undef" on error.
       When "read" fails, "YAML::Tiny" sets an error message internally you
       can recover via "YAML::Tiny->errstr". Although in some cases a failed
       "read" will also set the operating system error variable $!, not all
       errors do and you should not rely on using the $! variable.
   read_string $string;
       The "read" constructor reads a YAML file from a file name, and returns
       a new "YAML::Tiny" object containing the parsed content.
       Returns the object on success, or "undef" on error.
   write $filename
       The "write" method generates the file content for the properties, and
       writes it to disk to the filename specified.
       Returns true on success or "undef" on error.
   write_string
       Generates the file content for the object and returns it as a string.
   errstr
       When an error occurs, you can retrieve the error message either from
       the $YAML::Tiny::errstr variable, or using the "errstr()" method.
FUNCTIONS
       YAML::Tiny implements a number of functions to add compatibility with
       the YAML API. These should be a drop-in replacement, except that
       YAML::Tiny will not export functions by default, and so you will need
       to explicitly import the functions.
   Dump
         my $string = Dump(list-of-Perl-data-structures);
       Turn Perl data into YAML. This function works very much like
       Data::Dumper::Dumper().
       It takes a list of Perl data strucures and dumps them into a serialized
       form.
       It returns a string containing the YAML stream.
       The structures can be references or plain scalars.
   Load
         my @documents = Load(string-containing-a-YAML-stream);
       Turn YAML into Perl data. This is the opposite of Dump.
       Just like Storable's thaw() function or the eval() function in relation
       to Data::Dumper.
       It parses a string containing a valid YAML stream into a list of Perl
       data structures.
   freeze() and thaw()
       Aliases to Dump() and Load() for Storable fans. This will also allow
       YAML::Tiny to be plugged directly into modules like POE.pm, that use
       the freeze/thaw API for internal serialization.
   DumpFile(filepath, list)
       Writes the YAML stream to a file instead of just returning a string.
   LoadFile(filepath)
       Reads the YAML stream from a file instead of a string.
SUPPORT
       Bugs should be reported via the CPAN bug tracker at
       <http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=YAML-Tiny>;
AUTHOR
       Adam Kennedy <adamk AT cpan.org>
SEE ALSO
       YAML, YAML::Syck, Config::Tiny, CSS::Tiny,
       <http://use.perl.org/~Alias/journal/29427>;, <http://ali.as/>;
COPYRIGHT
       Copyright 2006 - 2012 Adam Kennedy.
       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
       under the same terms as Perl itself.
       The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included
       with this module.

perl v5.16.3                      2012-03-11                     YAML::Tiny(3)