Boolean Type Words in YAML

YAML is a widely used data serialization language. In almost any software project, or during any dev-ops tasks, you can come across with YAML. For example Ruby on Rails uses YAML for fixtures, configuration files and localization. CI/CD tools such as CircleCI and Travis also use YAML for configuration. If you ever experienced a strange behaviour with YAML, you may have used one of the many reserved words of YAML. YAML reserves some words such as ‘yes’, ’no’, ‘y’, ’n’, ‘off’, ‘on’, etc. for boolean type. For example:

yes:
	turkish: evet
  english: yes
no:
	turkish: hayır
	english: no

will be interpreted as:

true:
	turkish: evet
  english: true
false:
	turkish: hayır
	english: false

actually YAML has a long list of reserved words for the boolean type:

y|Y|yes|Yes|YES|n|N|no|No|NO
|true|True|TRUE|false|False|FALSE
|on|On|ON|off|Off|OFF

In order to prevent YAML from interpreting these words as a boolean, you need to wrap them in single or double quotes as follows:

'yes':
	'turkish': 'evet'
    'german': 'ja'
    'english': 'yes'
'no':
	'turkish': 'hayır'
    'german': 'nein'
	'english': 'no'

YAML also interprets some words to null, so wrap them inside quotes too:

~ # (canonical)
|null|Null|NULL # (English)
| # (Empty)

Cheers.