alt Hacker News> When dealing with large YAML files, I find myself frequently popping them into online “YAML to JSON” tools to actually figure out WTF is going on.
YAML is a strict superset of JSON, so defining the former in the syntax of the latter is fully supported by the spec. Perhaps not by every YAML library, to be sure, but those which do not are not conformant. From the YAML spec[0]:
The YAML 1.23 specification was published in 2009. Its
primary focus was making YAML a strict superset of JSON.
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For sure, but most YAML you actually encounter does not use much in the way of JSON syntax, it looks a lot more like this: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/wp-content/uploads/sit...
Where arrays and objects just look too similar (IMO), white space is significant, most strings are unquoted, etc. And personally I find it quite difficult to really understand what’s going on there, at a glance, compared to JSON (or JSON5).
I'm confused about your point about YAML being "strict superset of JSON" leading to being able to convert YAML to JSON.
If YAML is a strict superset, wouldn't that mean that YAML must have at least one feature that is not part of JSON? Wouldn't that make it impossible to define all YAML files as valid JSON?