How do I declare a string with both single and double quotes in YAML?

Question

I'm internationalizing an application and cannot figure out how to declare a translation string that contains both single and double quotes. Here's an example of the en.yml string that I am trying to

en:
  my_string: When you're using double quotes, they look like "this"

With the above string, I get the following error:

can not load translations from /vagrant/config/locales/en.yml,
expected it to return a hash, but does not

If there were just double quotes, I would wrap it in single quotes and vise-versa. How do I handle both double and single quotes though?

Solution 1

escaping should be done like this

"When you're using double quotes, they look like \"this\""

Solution 2

Actually I can’t figure out why do you need obsolete typewriter quotes in translation strings. There is 2013 around and we are not stuck to ASCII-7 anymore. The typography rules dictate their demands to use unicode quotation marks.

That’s the best practice ever: map those within 3rd keyboard level (or, eventually, sed your yml):

"When you’re using double quotes, they look like “this”"

With such an approach you’ll never run into troubles with escaping and your clients will definitely say “oh, neat.”

Sorry, if this seems a little bit off-topic, but since the question was about translation strings, I still consider it to be the best solution.

Solution 3

See if this works for you, it works perfectly for me in my spring boot applications where I needed to pass JSON values in:

Using YAML pipe style:

app.json:
  values: |
    {"key": "value"}

Your case would be:

en:
  my_string: |
    When you're using double quotes, they look like "this"

Folded style might work too but I haven't tried.

See more here: http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/yaml/yaml_format.html#strings

Comments

[Peter Brown]

I like this idea! Just discovered I could type them with option+left/right bracket (OS X).

[Knetic]

I know I'm late to the game with this, but using odd character for quotes doesn't make sense. They're difficult to insert, make parsing a pain (any process which ever consumes your data will need to be aware that you're using nonstandard quotes), but don't add anything. Just escape them, as in the accepted answer - there are no surprises for anyone with that method.

[Aleksei Matiushkin]

@Knetic You just don’t get a point. It makes a huge sense, it’s easy to insert, it makes parsing a charm (left and right quotes differ) and nobody being sane would operate on your translated strings automatically on purpose. On the other hand you add an aesthetics, that has more value than everything ever. In 2015 only Neanderthals still get stuck with typewriters quotes.

[elsurudo]

This... doesn't work for me. When I do something like this and then puts the string, it prints When you're using double quotes, they look like \"this\". Help?

[jvnill]

are you surrounding it in double quotes?

[elsurudo]

Yep. Tried single quotes as well – same result.

[jvnill]

no it should be in double quotes. if you're using single quotes, the single quote is the one you need to escape, ie add a backslash before it. paste your entire code here or ask another question.

[t7tran]

I don't know in which use case I would consider this particular option but it should not be considered as a decent solution. It merely pushes the problem to others.

[Anthon]

According to the YAML specification this quoted scalar you present as an alternative is exactly the same as the plain scalar the OP was using. This is easily verified by pasting both versions in an online parser like nimyaml.org/testing.html. So this is most like an actual bug in the ruby YAML implementation.