Re: Invalid YAML output from EXPLAIN

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Greg Sabino Mullane <greg(at)turnstep(dot)com> wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> I don't think the above would be particularly hard to implement myself,
> but if it becomes a really big deal, we can certainly punt by simply
> quoting anything containing an indicator (the special characters above).
> It will still be 100% valid YAML, just with some excess quoting for the
> very rare case when a value contains one of the special characters.

Since you're the main advocate of this feature, I think you should
implement it rather than leaving it to Tom or I.

The reason why I was initially skeptical of adding a YAML output
format is that JSON is a subset of YAML. Therefore, the JSON output
format ought to be perfectly sufficient for anyone using a YAML
parser. If it's not, that's because their YAML processor is broken,
and they should get a new one, or because the YAML spec is defective.
The YAML format got voted in by consensus because people thought that
it would also make a nice alternative to the text format for human
readable output. I don't believe that (it uses way too much vertical
space) but even if you accept the argument, the more we make the YAML
format look like the JSON format, the less water that argument holds.

--
Robert Haas
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