YAML syntax
YAML is a human friendly language for the communication of data between people and computers. The language is rich enough to represent almost any conceivable data structure or object inside a running computer program, as a readable plain text file. This type of language is often called a “serialization language” and YAML is definitely one of those. But unlike most serialization languages, the YAML format tries hard to make simple things really simple.
This is how the YAML data project puts it, and it's spot on. Thus, for anything where we need configuration files that should be readable by both humans and machines, we use the YAML language.
learning YAML
debugging YAML
To get line-specific infos on yaml formatting issues, you can use prettier, an opinionated code formatter that supports yaml among a bunch of other formats.
It is available via the conda-forge channel, so you can install it into its own prettier conda environment with:
conda create --channel conda-forge -n prettier prettier
conda activate prettier
You can then run it on a yaml file using the --check flag to pinpoint formatting issues.
For example, on a file config.yaml in the config/ subdirectory, this would be:
prettier --check config/config.yaml