# YAML Broken? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [July 25, 2006, 11:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/yaml-broken/99864 "2006-07-25T23:42:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/a9adbd/32.png) [@dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dpitman)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2006, 11:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/yaml-broken/99864/1 "2006-07-25T23:42:48Z")
Folks, It seems that when I YAML.dump arrays that contain long strings that contain non-printables and sometimes UTF-8 sequences, the YAML’ed objects can’t be read back in. Is this a known issue? If so, is there a known work-around? Alternatively, are there any other ways to serialize objects (JSON doesn’t work because eval() barfs on very long strings)? Thanks, David ---
**Author:** ![dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/a9adbd/32.png) [@dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dpitman)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2006, 11:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/yaml-broken/99864/2 "2006-07-25T23:58:50Z")
David P. wrote: > David There’s always Marshal. [http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Marshal.html](http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Marshal.html) -Justin ---
**Author:** ![dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/a9adbd/32.png) [@dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dpitman)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 12:05am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/yaml-broken/99864/3 "2006-07-26T00:05:03Z")
On Wed, 26 Jul 2006, David P. wrote: > David can you show an example? harp:~ \> ruby -r yaml -e’ nul = 0.chr; y(YAML.load(YAML.dump(nul)) == nul) ’ true harp:~ \> ruby -v ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-01) [i686-linux] -a ---
**Author:** ![dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/a9adbd/32.png) [@dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dpitman)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 1:55am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/yaml-broken/99864/4 "2006-07-26T01:55:34Z")
David P. wrote: > Folks, > > It seems that when I YAML.dump arrays that contain long strings that > contain non-printables and sometimes UTF-8 sequences, the YAML’ed > objects can’t be read back in. Is this a known issue? If so, is > there a known work-around? Alternatively, are there any other ways to > serialize objects (JSON doesn’t work because eval() barfs on very long > strings)? > If you’re on Windows, check you’re reading and writing in binary mode… > Not sure if that’s what’ll be causing your problem, but it’s tripped > me up before. ---
**Author:** ![dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/a9adbd/32.png) [@dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dpitman)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 12:14am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/yaml-broken/99864/5 "2006-07-26T00:14:14Z")
Thanks! ---
**Author:** ![dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/a9adbd/32.png) [@dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dpitman)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 8:27am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/yaml-broken/99864/6 "2006-07-26T08:27:01Z")
> It seems that when I YAML.dump arrays that contain long strings that > contain non-printables and sometimes UTF-8 sequences, the YAML’ed > objects can’t be read back in. Is this a known issue? If so, is > there a known work-around? Alternatively, are there any other ways to > serialize objects (JSON doesn’t work because eval() barfs on very long > strings)? > I’ve had that in one of my rails projects. Luckily it was for a cache, > and > it only happened sporadically. So my solution was to catch the exception > and just not read that cache file back in, but recreating it from its > source. You might of course not have that option. I have posted on ruby-core about it, but haven’t gotten much interest/feedback. I even had a file that threw an exception on each YAML.load. (Which I deleted some time ago) [http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.core/6996](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.core/6996) No help offered there, but I wanted to show compassion… 😉 kaspar ---
**Author:** ![dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/a9adbd/32.png) [@dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dpitman)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 6:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/yaml-broken/99864/7 "2006-07-26T18:00:36Z")
I’m enclosing a file that contains a Marshal’ed array. To reproduce the failure: gunzip enclosed file a = Marshal.load(enclosed\_file) a == YAML.load(YAML.dump(a)) ---
**Author:** ![dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/a9adbd/32.png) [@dpitman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dpitman)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 10:19am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/yaml-broken/99864/8 "2006-07-26T10:19:54Z")
On 25/07/06, David P. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > It seems that when I YAML.dump arrays that contain long strings that > contain non-printables and sometimes UTF-8 sequences, the YAML’ed > objects can’t be read back in. Is this a known issue? If so, is > there a known work-around? Alternatively, are there any other ways to > serialize objects (JSON doesn’t work because eval() barfs on very long > strings)? Are you using 1.8.4? I was bitten by this in Ruby 1.8.2, and actually managed to track it down to a specific combination (when a hash key was a string containing both 0x00 and 0x0A in a non-final position). That specific bug seems to be fixed in 1.8.4, however. Paul.