yaml type inference rules

[rsgalloway]

problem: some unquoted keys (and values) are getting converted on load, e.g. "YES: 1" is converted to "True: 1" automatically. this behavior may be useful on values, but unexpected on keys.

yaml since 1.1 treats certain unquoted strings (like yes, no, on, off, etc.) as booleans. several other potential issues can arise due to YAML’s type inference rules, especially in YAML 1.1, e.g. null, dates and timestamps, boolean-like variants, etc.

potential solutions include quoting problematic keys/values:

  "YES": 1

implementing custom loaders, or disabling the boolean resolver:

yaml.resolver.Resolver.remove_implicit_resolver('tag:yaml.org,2002:bool')