YAML comments in multi-line strings

36
votes

Does YAML support comments in multi-line strings?

I'm trying to do things like this, but the validator is throwing errors:

key:
  #comment
  value
  #comment
  value
  value     #comments here don't work either
1
yaml

1 Answers

36
votes

No. Per the YAML 1.2 spec "Comments must not appear inside scalars". Which is exactly the case here. There's no way in YAML to escape the octothorpe symbol (#) so within a multi-line string there's no way to disambiguate the comment from the raw string value.

You can however interleave comments within a collection. For example, if you really needed to, you could break your string into a sequence of strings one per line:

key: #comment
  - value line 1
  #comment
  - value line 2
  #comment
  - value line 3

Should work...