cl-yaml

A YAML parser and emitter built on top of libyaml. Uses the cl-libyaml library.

Usage

The yaml package exports three functions:

• (parse string-or-pathname): Parses a string or a pathname into Lisp values.
• (emit value stream): Emit a Lisp value into a stream.
• (emit-to-string value): Emit a Lisp value into a string.

Parsing

CL-USER> (yaml:parse "[1, 2, 3]")
(1 2 3)

CL-USER> (yaml:parse "{ a: 1, b: 2 }")
{"a" => 1, "b" => 2}

CL-USER> (yaml:parse "- Mercury
- Venus
- Earth
- Mars")
("Mercury" "Venus" "Earth" "Mars")

CL-USER> (yaml:parse "foo
---
bar" :multi-document-p t)
(:DOCUMENTS "foo" "bar")

Emitting

CL-USER> (yaml:emit-to-string (list 1 2 3))
"[1, 2, 3]"

CL-USER> (yaml:emit-to-string
           (alexandria:alist-hash-table '(("a" . 1)
                                          ("b" . 2))))
"{ b: 2, a: 1 }"

CL-USER> (yaml:emit (list t 123 3.14) *standard-output*)
[true, 123, 3.14]

Documentation

Type Mapping

cl-yaml uses YAML's Core Schema to map YAML values to Lisp types an vice versa. A table showing the correspondence of values and types is shown below:

YAML type	Lisp type
Null	nil
Boolean	t and nil
Integer	Integer
Float	Double float
String	String
List	List
Map	Hash table
Document	(:document ...)

IEEE Floating Point Support

Common Lisp doesn't natively support the IEEE special floating point values: NaN (Not a number), positive infinity and negative infinity are unrepresentable in portable Common Lisp. Since YAML allows documents to include these values, we have to figure out what to do with them. cl-yaml supports multiple float strategies.

The default strategy is :keyword, which uses keywords to represent these values. The strategy can be customized by setting the value of yaml.float:*float-strategy* to one of the following keywords:

1. :error: The simplest approach, simply signal the condition yaml.error:unsupported-float-value whenever a NaN or infinity value is encountered.

2. :keyword: Use keywords to represent the different values, i.e.: :NaN for NaN, :+Inf for positive infinity and :-Inf for negative infinity.

3. :best-effort: Use implementation-specific values whenever possible, fall back on :keyword in unsupported implementations. On SBCL and Allegro Common Lisp, NaN and infinity can be represented.

License

Copyright (c) 2013-2015 Fernando Borretti

Licensed under the MIT License.