Re: Possible bug with null document in libyaml

Ok, sounds reasonable.

In that case the bug is that libyaml output when told to write a single 
"" scalar, does not write the correct thing, instead writing text that 
looks the same as an empty document.

It is true that if you ask for document-start to be written it fixes it 
but there does not seem to be a requirement for that, and in fact I 
would prefer not to as the documents I am writing are so short that the 
extra 8 bytes are a significant fraction.

> It has always been the intent of YAML, that a Stream may contain zero or 
> more Documents. This implies that there needs to be a way to serialize 
> zero objects.
> 
> BTW, a stream containing just comments is another example of something 
> that will parse as having zero documents.
> 
> It may not be written like this in the spec, but one way to think of it 
> is as follows:
> 
>    1. Every YAML Document in a YAML Stream begins with '---'.
>    2. If the first thing a parser sees in a stream, after skipping all
>       ignorable whitespace (including comments), is not '---', nor a
>       YAML directive, the parser should assume it saw "---\n".
>    3. If, after skipping all ignorable whitespace, the parser reaches
>       the End Of Stream, it should report an STREAM_END event, without
>       reporting any documents.
> 
> Being able to serialize zero documents is important. For a real use 
> case, imagine a service listening for YAML documents over a web socket. 
> If the socket is closed after receiving no data, the service should 
> *not* parse that as one document containing an empty string.
> 
> After testing all these cases against libyaml, IMHO it gets things right 
> every time.
> 
> Cheers, Ingy
>  
> 
>     Thanks
>     Bill Spitzak
>     Rhythm & Hues software department.
> 
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