From: Simon Chiang <simon.a.chiang@...>
Date: 2009-04-10T23:41:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Emit YAML without leading hyphens?


> perfectly valid yaml (ruby yaml loads it happily) - i simply dont
> understand why those hyphens are created, when the yaml file _without_
> hyphens works perfectly nice.

One reason for the hyphens is to allow multiple YAML documents (ie
separate objects) to be stored in a single file:

  docs = [1,2,3].to_yaml + [4,5,6].to_yaml

  results = []
  YAML.load_documents(docs) do |doc|
    results << doc
  end
  puts results.inspect      # => "[[1,2,3], [4,5,6]]"

Notice each of the arrays is loaded separately.  As for removing the
header, take a look at this post:

  http://www.arkanis-development.de/weblog/2007/6/20/options-for-rubys-@to_yaml@-method

The author was facing the same problem.  The option is {:UseHeader =>
false} but the to_yaml options aren't currently used and don't work,
even though at some point they probably did.  It's a deficiency in the
current release.