Bug in YAML for Ruby?

Ruby
1

I’m getting some strange behavior with YAML in ruby regarding the
characters ‘08’ in a hash.

This code:

require ‘yaml’
test = { “08” => ‘01’, ‘01’ => ‘08’, ‘8’ => ‘01’
}
File.open(“test.yml”, “w”) {|f| YAML.dump(test, f)}

produces this file:

“01”: 08
“8”: “01”
08: “01”

I do not understand why the 08s are not quoted. I tried it under ruby
1.8.2 and 1.8.4.

Is this expected?

thanks,
-Matt

2

On Mar 23, 2006, at 1:57 AM, Matt R. wrote:

produces this file:

“01”: 08
“8”: “01”
08: “01”

I do not understand why the 08s are not quoted. I tried it under ruby
1.8.2 and 1.8.4.

Is this expected?

It is not a bug, but it is confusing. According the the YAML spec[1]
numbers prefixed with a 0 signal an octal base (as does in Ruby).
However 08 is not a valid octal number, so it doesn’t get quoted.

[1] Integer Language-Independent Type for YAML Version 1.1

– Daniel

3

Matt R. wrote:

produces this file:

“01”: 08
“8”: “01”
08: “01”

I do not understand why the 08s are not quoted. I tried it under ruby
1.8.2 and 1.8.4.

Is this expected?

I think so. The quotes are needed to disambiguate the string “01” from
the octal number. If quotes were not added by dump, then 01 would be
loaded as the fixnum 1 rather than the string “01”. There’s no ambiguity
with 08 because it is not legal octal, so it must be a string.

irb(main):004:0> YAML.load “foo: 08”
=> {“foo”=>“08”}
irb(main):005:0> YAML.load “foo: 07”
=> {“foo”=>7}
irb(main):006:0> YAML.load “foo: 017”
=> {“foo”=>15}

Note in the last case the conversion from octal.

4

On Mar 22, 2006, at 7:57 PM, Matt R. wrote:

thanks,
-Matt

–
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Well just guessing here, but you don’t have to quote 08 because it
couldn’t be an octal number anyway, so it must be a string. I don’t
know if this is why this happens or if this is what the YAML spec
says but it makes sense to me, sorta.