Optional quoting

Hi guys, we are using this great library(!) to generate configuration files for our microservices.

It works perfectly and we have no issues with that, but there is one thing that we could improve in generated files.

Basically this is what we get after using YamlBuilders to create yaml file:

application:
  name: template
  "instance-id": "${random.uuid}"
  version: @project.version@
server:
  port: 8081
spring:
  kafka:
    "bootstrap-servers": "localhost:8092"
  cloud:
    kubernetes:
      enabled: false

as you can see, some of the key/values are quoted – ".

Is there a poissibility to always skip quotes so the outcome would be:

application:
  name: template
  instance-id: ${random.uuid}
  version: @project.version@
server:
  port: 8081
spring:
  kafka:
    bootstrap-servers: localhost:8092
  cloud:
    kubernetes:
      enabled: false

?

I search docs and closed tickets, but could not find answer for my question.

[sta-szek]

I see, thanks for providing detailed explanation and customization example! 🚀

[amihaiemil]

@sta-szek There is no option to unquote them. There were lengthy discussions around here about special characters and quotation, so we decided to just quote (escape) any string (key or value) which contains YAML special characters such as : or -.

However, don’t forget that both YamlMapping and YamlSequence are interfaces, so you can most likely write your own decorator which would remove these quotations. Something like this:

public final class Unqouted implements YamlMapping {
    private final YamlMapping original;

    public Unqoted(final YamlMapping original) {
        this.original = original;
    }

    //implement the methods of YamlMapping, delegate what you need to the original
   //and remove quotes from the returned values/keys where needed.
}

Then you would just use this class as follows:

final YamlMapping unqoted = new Unquoted(
    YamlMappingBuilder
    ...
    .build()
);

And this unqoted YamlMapping should behave/print as you wish, without qoutes 😄

Does this help? I’m afraid there is no other option.

We will not change the quoting mechanism because, as I said, there were a lot of discussions and we finally come to a point where most users are happy.