ruby / ruby/psych

Don't let users attempt to alias/merge arrays

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Dominant language
Ruby
Stars
597
Forks
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Avg merge
11h 23m
Merged PRs (30d)
3

Description

I encountered the confusing behavior described below because I didn't realize that one couldn't merge arrays, only maps. Perhaps we should instead make the parser more strict and throw an error rather than producing the unexpected object structure?

The confusing behavior:

YAML.load("
# Bad! can't merge alias/arrays
foo: &foo  
  - a: 1
bar: 
  <<: *foo
")

=> {"foo"=>[{"a"=>1}], "bar"=>{"<<"=>[{"a"=>1}]}}

Note the appearance of the odd <<. I was expecting expected

   {"foo"=>[{"a"=>1}], "bar"=>[{"a"=>1}]}

As discussed here, my error is that the problem is that &foo is an attempted alias for an array. It would have been ideal if the parser had indicated my error instead.

In case relevant:

ENV['RBENV_VERSION']
=> "2.4"
YAML.libyaml_version
=> [0, 1, 4]

(Also, not entirely sure if this request belongs here or at https://github.com/yaml/libyaml , please feel free to redirect me!)

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the YAML.load example and inspect how Psych handles an alias used with the << merge key when the aliased value is an array. The change is done when this invalid array merge is rejected with an error instead of producing a hash containing the literal << key.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
ruby
Domain
backend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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