quarto-dev / quarto-dev/quarto-cli

Improve error message with malformed YAML

Open
#12,744 6 comments 2 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@cscheid is already working on this.

Since May 15, 2025.

enhancement lint
Dominant language
JavaScript
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Description

Consider this:

---
format: html
title: "Hello"
---

```{r}
#| eval: true
#| warning = false
cat("hello, world")
```

The error message we get is exceedingly unhelpful:

$ quarto render bad-yaml.qmd
ERROR: YAMLException: can not read a block mapping entry; a multiline key may not be an implicit key (bad-yaml.qmd, 8:19)
7: #| eval: true
8: #| warning = false
                    ~
9: cat("hello, world")

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