Bug: Apostrophes are dropped when converting back to YAML

Hello,

First of all, thank you for the great tool that is yq.

I would like to report a problem I noticed in version 3.0.2, well values of type string whose value is yes or no, when converted back to YAML have apostrophes dropped, which will cause the YAML parser to convert such values to type boolean. See the following examples.

My environment:

$ jq --version
jq-master-v20210212-7320-g4be84a0f82
$ yq --version
yq 3.0.2
$ python3 --version
Python 3.9.5
$ cat /etc/alpine-release 
3.14.0

Example file example.yaml:

---
graphana_dashboard: 'yes'

Actual command result:

$ yq --yaml-output '.' example.yaml 
graphana_dashboard: yes

Expected result of the command:

$ yq --yaml-output '.' example.yaml 
grafana_dashboard: 'yes'

For the example in version 2.14.0, which I have used so far, the result of the command is as expected. I also checked what the document looks like in JSON format, after conversion by yq 3.0.2, well it is as expected, which would mean that the problem occurs when converting from JSON to YAML again.

$ yq '.' example.yaml 
{
  "grafana_dashboard": "yes"
}

Regards Piotr Minkina

[kislyuk]

Thanks for the feedback. I’ve been thinking about this and I’m going to release an update to v3 which will use yaml 1.2 as the input grammar, but yaml 1.1 as the output grammar by default. This will preserve the quotes in the example that you gave.

Please understand that this is a tricky backwards compatibility situation. If you take the github actions yaml for example, it uses the bare on: key frequently, implying the 1.2 grammar. Any yq invocations on that yaml should keep the output formatting as close to the original as possible, but I agree with you that the safest/most backwards compatible output is to quote the ambiguous values - resulting in "on": and other quoting that may appear inconsistent.

[kislyuk]

Released in v3.1.0, please test.