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Data

Gregor von Laszewski (laszewski@gmail.com)

1 - Data Formats

Gregor von Laszewski (laszewski@gmail.com)

YAML

The term YAML stand for “YAML Ainot Markup Language.” According to the Web Page at

“YAML is a human friendly data serialization standard for all programming languages.” There are multiple versions of YAML existing and one needs to take care of that your software supports the right version. The current version is YAML 1.2.

YAML is often used for configuration and in many cases can also be used as XML replacement. Important is tat YAM in contrast to XML removes the tags while replacing them with indentation. This has naturally the advantage that it is mor easily to read, however, the format is strict and needs to adhere to proper indentation. Thus it is important that you check your YAML files for correctness, either by writing for example a python program that read your yaml file, or an online YAML checker such as provided at

An example on how to use yaml in python is provided in our next example. Please note that YAML is a superset of JSON. Originally YAML was designed as a markup language. However as it is not document oriented but data oriented it has been recast and it does no longer classify itself as markup language.

import os
import sys
import yaml

try:
    yamlFilename = os.sys.argv[1]
    yamlFile = open(yamlFilename, "r")
except:
    print("filename does not exist")
    sys.exit()
try:
   yaml.load(yamlFile.read())
except:
   print("YAML file is not valid.")

Resources:

JSON

The term JSON stand for JavaScript Object Notation. It is targeted as an open-standard file format that emphasizes on integration of human-readable text to transmit data objects. The data objects contain attribute value pairs. Although it originates from JavaScript, the format itself is language independent. It uses brackets to allow organization of the data. PLease note that YAML is a superset of JSON and not all YAML documents can be converted to JSON. Furthermore JSON does not support comments. For these reasons we often prefer to us YAMl instead of JSON. However JSON data can easily be translated to YAML as well as XML.

Resources:

XML

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. XML allows to define documents with the help of a set of rules in order to make it machine readable. The emphasize here is on machine readable as document in XML can become quickly complex and difficult to understand for humans. XML is used for documents as well as data structures.

A tutorial about XML is available at

Resources: