yaml_parse: Parse YAML

In zuyaml: Parse and Emit 'YAML' 1.2

Parse YAML

Description

yaml_parse() parses a single YAML document. yaml_parse_all() parses a YAML stream and returns one element per document.

Usage

yaml_parse(
  x,
  simplify = FALSE,
  aliases = c("resolve", "error"),
  big_integers = c("bigint", "double", "error"),
  tags = c("ignore", "error"),
  duplicate_keys = FALSE,
  max_depth = 128L,
  max_size = 64 * 1024^2,
  max_nodes = 1e+06,
  path = NULL
)

yaml_parse_all(
  x,
  simplify = FALSE,
  aliases = c("resolve", "error"),
  big_integers = c("bigint", "double", "error"),
  tags = c("ignore", "error"),
  duplicate_keys = FALSE,
  max_depth = 128L,
  max_size = 64 * 1024^2,
  max_nodes = 1e+06,
  path = NULL
)

Arguments

x	A length-one character vector containing YAML, or a raw vector of UTF-8 YAML bytes.
simplify	If TRUE, sequences whose elements are all scalars of the same type collapse to an atomic vector. The default is FALSE, so the shape of the result never depends on the contents of the document.
aliases	How to treat YAML aliases. "resolve" (the default) replaces each alias with the value of its target; node identity is not preserved. "error" rejects any document containing an alias.
big_integers	How to represent integers too large for an R numeric type to hold exactly (beyond 2^53). "bigint" (the default) returns a zuyaml_bigint character vector holding the decimal value, "double" is an explicit opt-in to lossy conversion, and "error" refuses the document. The package never loses integer precision silently.
tags	How to treat an application tag such as !duration. Core schema tags (!!str, !!int, !!float, !!bool, !!null) always override resolution, so ⁠!!str 12⁠ is the string "12". "ignore" (the default) converts a tagged value as though it were untagged; "error" rejects the document. Ignoring is the default because rejecting would refuse a great deal of ordinary YAML.
duplicate_keys	If FALSE (the default), a mapping with duplicate keys is an error. If TRUE, duplicates become duplicate names in the resulting list.
max_depth	Maximum nesting depth, or 0 for unlimited.
max_size	Maximum input size in bytes, or 0 for unlimited.
max_nodes	Maximum number of R values materialised, or 0 for unlimited. This is the limit that bounds alias expansion: a billion-laughs document is small and shallow, so neither max_size nor max_depth constrains it. The default leaves roughly fifty times the headroom a very large document needs.
path	Optional file path, used only to make error messages more informative. yaml_read() and its companions set it for you.

Details

Both functions parse the input as a stream. yaml_parse() then requires it to contain exactly one document, so trailing documents are never silently discarded:

documents	yaml_parse()	yaml_parse_all()
0	error	list()
1	the object	list of length 1
more	error	list of that length

A zero-document stream is an error rather than NULL, because NULL is the legitimate result of parsing a document whose content is null. Comment-only input is a zero-document stream.

Value

yaml_parse() returns an R object. yaml_parse_all() returns a list with one element per document.

Examples

yaml_parse("host: localhost\nport: 8080\ntls: true\n")

# The core schema, not YAML 1.1: `yes` is a string, and a quoted number
# stays a string.
str(yaml_parse("answer: yes\nversion: \"42\"\n"))

# A stream is not a sequence: one element per document.
yaml_parse_all("---\nfirst\n---\nsecond\n")

zuyaml documentation built on Oct. 7, 2026, 5:08 p.m.