list indention style is different from pyyaml

consider the following pyyaml code (try yourself):

import yaml

print yaml.dump(
  {
    "foo": [1, 2, 3]
  },
  default_flow_style=False
)

which outputs

foo:
- 1
- 2
- 3

and the comparable js-yaml counterpart (try yourself):

const yaml = require("js-yaml");

console.log(
  yaml.safeDump({
    foo: [1, 2, 3]
  })
);

which outputs

foo:
  - 1
  - 2
  - 3

You can see that pyyaml doesn’t add spaces to lists (because - counts as indention). I know both are valid, but it would be great if we could a similar output as pyyaml (especially as this project started as some kind of fork)?

Changing this line to

writeBlockSequence(state, level - 1, state.dump, compact);

changes the behaviour so it should be possible to add a configuration setting to allow both behaviours.

[puzrin]

• Probably, “most of frameworks” just are just binding to libyaml. There are no standard OR recommendations about better output look.
• “needless whitespaces” is not good argument, because yaml is about readability, not about size optimizations

You request a breaking change without valuable profit (at least, i could not understand it) - i don’t like such balance.

[thewilli]

Adding “everything possible” make API messy very quickly.

And I do totally agree. But it’s not that the proposal is completely messing with the output (let’s configure an option to dump XML), but a different behaviour others have adopted.

I’d like to understand, what’s wrong right now? Output is valid yaml. Other yaml parser should accept it ok.

My use case (and I can think of others): Some different tool chains work with a YAML content, and

• detect changes when they are aren’t any (because only whitespace has changed)
• YAML files checked in a VCS like git will pollute the history with whitespace changes, complicating to work with actual changes (git blame will refer to whitespace- instead of content changes)