How to correctly have multi line yaml strings?

Question

newlines on multiple lines does not seem to work out for me:

Something like:

  intro: |
    We are happy that you are interested in
    and  
    more

and + more needs to be on a newline but it fails.

  intro: |
    | We are happy that you are interested in
    | and  
    | more

or

  intro: |
    We are happy that you are interested in \n
    and  
    more <2 spaces >
    another one

All fail.

How to correctly have multiline in a yaml text block?

I use this in HAML view in rails app like

= t("mailer.beta_welcome.intro")

But no newlines are printed this way, do i need to output it differently with raw or something?

Are you getting an error? What's your output? What are you expecting? — cortex, Nov 13 '13 at 17:11
Possible duplicate of [How do I break a string over multiple lines?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3790454/how-do-i-break-a-string-over-multiple-lines) — codeforester, Jul 12 '19 at 01:03

score 10 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 13 '13 at 17:03

10

Your first example works fine

foo.yml

intro: |
  We are happy that you are interested in
  and  
  more

foo.rb

require 'yaml'
puts YAML.load_file('foo.yml').inspect

Output

{"intro"=>"We are happy that you are interested in\nand  \nmore\n"}

answered Nov 13 '13 at 17:03

maček

76,434
37
167
198

hmm it does not work for me :S. I try to put email content into locale to use in haml like = t("mailer.beta_welcome.intro") it does not print the newlines – Rubytastic Nov 13 '13 at 17:48

cincodenada · Answer 2 · 2021-01-15T18:03:12.253

Late answer for Googlers:

It looks like you were trying to output it as HTML, which means it was indeed outputting the newlines if you were to inspect the page. HTML largely ignores whitespace, however, so your newlines and spaces were being converted into just a space by the HTML renderer.

According to the simple_format docs, simple_format applies a few simple formatting rules to text output in order to render it closer to what the plaintext output would be - significantly, it converts newlines to <br/> tags.

So your problem had nothing to do with YAML, which was performing as expected. It was actually because of how HTML works, which is also as expected. simple_format fixed it because it took your string from YAML with newlines and converted it to a string with <br/> tags so that the newlines actually showed up in the HTML, which is what you wanted in the first place.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 13 '13 at 17:55

1

Ugh.. after digging more on different keywords I found that

  = simple_format(t("mailer.beta_welcome.intro"))

does the trick although this seems stupid i see no workaround for now

answered Nov 13 '13 at 17:55

Rubytastic

15,001
18
87
175

1

See [my answer](http://stackoverflow.com/a/24249416/306323): this isn't a stupid trick, it's just misunderstanding how HTML works. – cincodenada Jun 16 '14 at 17:52

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 28 '14 at 08:33

1

You can put your string in single quotes, it helps me:

intro: 'We are happy that you are interested in and
more'

answered Jan 28 '14 at 08:33

demyasha

31
2

How to correctly have multi line yaml strings?

4 Answers4