How to prevent escaped newlines from being used?

[jecdx]

Is there a way to force the formatted yaml to not have \n sequences in the strings?

e.g.

Input:

foo: "First line.\nSecond line.\n"

Desired output:

foo: |
  First line.
  Second line.

The content of the string itself has not changed, if I am not mistaken.

[krmcbride]

I just ran into this, fixed it by adding trim_trailing_whitespace: true to the formatter config, you probably have a dangling whitespace in your multiline block like I did which triggers the single line formatting. With whitespace trimming enabled it leaves it alone.

[braydonk]

Yep that is almost certainly the case.

The reason for this parser quirk is because yaml sucks. With the whitespace on the end of the string, it will end up parsing it as a quoteless string, treating the quotes as literal characters as well as the \ns. Adding trim_trailing_whitespace should do the trick.

[jecdx]

@krmcbride , @braydonk , trim_trailing_whitespace: true does not appear to work in all circumstances unfortunately.

I invoke yamlfmt (version 0.21.0) on the attached file with .\yamlfmt.exe .\longline.yaml.

longline.yaml

I have the following yamlfmt.yml in the same directory:

formatter:
  type: basic
  force_quote_style: single
  retain_line_breaks: true
  trim_trailing_whitespace: true

I have tried with the above config, and also with:

formatter:
  type: basic
  trim_trailing_whitespace: true

But the outputted yaml continues to put the string on a single really long line and uses escaped \n newlines.

Is there something about the string contents that forces the use of " around and \n throughout?

Are you able to yamlfmt the given file and not get the long string on a single really long line?

[braydonk]

The following are my attempts to reproduce the described issue off of v0.21.0. https://gist.github.com/braydonk/bccd886327b431415c9019a9359d7654