why does psych yaml interpreter add line breaks around 80 characters?

Question

Psych is the default yaml engine since ruby 1.9.3

Why, oh why does psych add a line break in its output? Check the example below.

ruby -v # => ruby 1.         


        

Answer 1

Why does it matter whether YAML wraps the line or not when it serializes the data?

The question is, after wrapping it, can YAML reconstruct the correct line later when it reloads the file? And, the answer is, yes, it can:

require 'yaml'
puts '"' + YAML.load("this absolutely normal sentence is more than eighty characters long because it IS".to_yaml) + '"'

Which outputs:

"this absolutely normal sentence is more than eighty characters long because it IS"

Data that has been serialized, is in a format that YAML understands. That's an important concept, as the data is YAML's at that point. We can mess with it in an editor, and add/subtract/edit, but the data is still YAML's, because it has to reload and reparse the data in order for our applications to use it. So, after the data makes a round-trip through YAML-land, if the data returns in the same form as it left, then everything is OK.

We'd have a problem if it was serialized and then corrupted during the parsing stage, but that doesn't happen.

You can modify some of YAML's Psych driver's behavior when it's serializing data. See the answers for "Documentation for Psych to_yaml options?" for more information.