This question has been asked before: Read and write YAML files without destroying anchors and aliases?
I was wondering how to solve that problem with many anchors and aliases?
thanks
This question has been asked before: Read and write YAML files without destroying anchors and aliases?
I was wondering how to solve that problem with many anchors and aliases?
thanks
The problem here is that anchors and aliases in Yaml are a serialization detail, and so aren’t part of the data after it’s been parsed, so the original anchor name isn’t known when writing the data back out to Yaml. In order to keep the anchor names when round tripping you need to store them somewhere when parsing so that they are available later when serializing. In Ruby any object can have instance variables associated with it, so an easy way to achieve this would be to store the anchor name in an instance variable of the objet in question.
Continuing from the example in the earlier question, for hashes we can change our redifined revive_hash
method so that if the hash is an anchor then as well as recording the anchor name in the @st
variable so later alises can be recognised, we add the it as an instance variable on the hash.
class ToRubyNoMerge < Psych::Visitors::ToRuby
def revive_hash hash, o
if o.anchor
@st[o.anchor] = hash
hash.instance_variable_set "@_yaml_anchor_name", o.anchor
end
o.children.each_slice(2) { |k,v|
key = accept(k)
hash[key] = accept(v)
}
hash
end
end
Note that this only affects yaml mappings that are anchors. If you want to have other types to keep their anchor name you’ll need to look at psych/visitors/to_ruby.rb
and make sure the name is added in all cases. Most types can be included by overriding register
but there are a couple of others; search for @st
.
Now that the hash has the desired anchor name associated with it, you need to make Psych use it instead of the object id when serializing it. This can be done by subclassing YAMLTree
. When YAMLTree
processes an object, it first checks to see if that object has been seen already, and emits an alias for it if it has. For any new objects, it records that it has seen the object in case it needs to create an alias later. The object_id
is used as the key in this, so you need to override those two methods to check for the instance variable, and use that instead if it exists:
class MyYAMLTree < Psych::Visitors::YAMLTree
# check to see if this object has been seen before
def accept target
if anchor_name = target.instance_variable_get('@_yaml_anchor_name')
if @st.key? anchor_name
oid = anchor_name
node = @st[oid]
anchor = oid.to_s
node.anchor = anchor
return @emitter.alias anchor
end
end
# accept is a pretty big method, call super to avoid copying
# it all here. super will handle the cases when it's an object
# that's been seen but doesn't have '@_yaml_anchor_name' set
super
end
# record object for future, using '@_yaml_anchor_name' rather
# than object_id if it exists
def register target, yaml_obj
anchor_name = target.instance_variable_get('@_yaml_anchor_name') || target.object_id
@st[anchor_name] = yaml_obj
yaml_obj
end
end
Now you can use it like this (unlike the previous question, you don’t need to create a custom emitter in this case):
builder = MyYAMLTree.new
builder << data
tree = builder.tree
puts tree.yaml # returns a string
# alternativelty write direct to file:
File.open('a_file.yml', 'r+') do |f|
tree.yaml f
end
here's a slightly modified version for up to newer versions of the psych gem. before it gave me the following error:
NoMethodError - undefined method `[]=' for #<Psych::Visitors::YAMLTree::Registrar:0x007fa0db6ba4d0>
the register
method moved into a subclass of YAMLTree
, so this works now with respect to everything what matt says in his answer:
class ToRubyNoMerge < Psych::Visitors::ToRuby
def revive_hash hash, o
if o.anchor
@st[o.anchor] = hash
hash.instance_variable_set "@_yaml_anchor_name", o.anchor
end
o.children.each_slice(2) { |k,v|
key = accept(k)
hash[key] = accept(v)
}
hash
end
end
class MyYAMLTree < Psych::Visitors::YAMLTree
class Registrar
# record object for future, using '@_yaml_anchor_name' rather
# than object_id if it exists
def register target, node
anchor_name = target.instance_variable_get('@_yaml_anchor_name') || target.object_id
@obj_to_node[anchor_name] = node
end
end
# check to see if this object has been seen before
def accept target
if anchor_name = target.instance_variable_get('@_yaml_anchor_name')
if @st.key? anchor_name
oid = anchor_name
node = @st[oid]
anchor = oid.to_s
node.anchor = anchor
return @emitter.alias anchor
end
end
# accept is a pretty big method, call super to avoid copying
# it all here. super will handle the cases when it's an object
# that's been seen but doesn't have '@_yaml_anchor_name' set
super
end
end
I had to further modify the code that @markus posted to work with Psych v2.0.17.
Here's what I ended up with. I hope it helps someone else save quite a bit of time. :-)
class ToRubyNoMerge < Psych::Visitors::ToRuby
def revive_hash hash, o
if o.anchor
@st[o.anchor] = hash
hash.instance_variable_set "@_yaml_anchor_name", o.anchor
end
o.children.each_slice(2) do |k,v|
key = accept(k)
hash[key] = accept(v)
end
hash
end
end
class Psych::Visitors::YAMLTree::Registrar
# record object for future, using '@_yaml_anchor_name' rather
# than object_id if it exists
def register target, node
@targets << target
@obj_to_node[_anchor_name(target)] = node
end
def key? target
@obj_to_node.key? _anchor_name(target)
rescue NoMethodError
false
end
def node_for target
@obj_to_node[_anchor_name(target)]
end
private
def _anchor_name(target)
target.instance_variable_get('@_yaml_anchor_name') || target.object_id
end
end
class MyYAMLTree < Psych::Visitors::YAMLTree
# check to see if this object has been seen before
def accept target
if anchor_name = target.instance_variable_get('@_yaml_anchor_name')
if @st.key? target
node = @st.node_for target
node.anchor = anchor_name
return @emitter.alias anchor_name
end
end
# accept is a pretty big method, call super to avoid copying
# it all here. super will handle the cases when it's an object
# that's been seen but doesn't have '@_yaml_anchor_name' set
super
end
def visit_String o
if o == '<<'
style = Psych::Nodes::Scalar::PLAIN
tag = 'tag:yaml.org,2002:str'
plain = true
quote = false
return @emitter.scalar o, nil, tag, plain, quote, style
end
# visit_String is a pretty big method, call super to avoid copying it all
# here. super will handle the cases when it's a string other than '<<'
super
end
end