<data, language> (YAML) A data serialisation language designed to be readable and writable by humans and to work well with modern programming languages.

YAML uses printable Unicode characters to represent both structure and data. The structural syntax is simple and terse. For example, indentation is used for structure, colons separate pairs, and dashes are used for list items.

YAML can represent mappings (hashes or dictionaries), sequences (arrays or lists), scalars (strings or numbers), or any combination of the above. It has a simple typing system and reference syntax. Its structures will be particularly familiar to programmers using Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, or Javascript, but YAML can be used with any programming language.

YAML is, in some respects, a simpler alternative to XML, though it does not share the constraints imposed by XML's SGML legacy and has somewhat different aims.

YAML Home .