🚀 [Feature]: YAML streams can now be normalized safely

[Marius Storhaug (MariusStorhaug)]

YAML streams can now be normalized into deterministic YAML without losing documents, tags, anchors, aliases, recursive graphs, complex keys, scalar content, or mapping order.

New: Deterministic YAML stream formatting

Format-Yaml accepts complete YAML text or line-oriented pipeline input, removes comments and presentation differences, emits every document with an explicit --- marker, and produces LF-only output without a final newline. -Indent selects 2 through 9 spaces, while the parser safety controls match ConvertFrom-Yaml.

Get-Content -Path '.\config.yaml' | Format-Yaml -Indent 4

Formatting is byte-idempotent at the same options, including multi-document streams, effective tags, aliases, recursive YAML graphs, and complex keys.

Review fixes

• MaxTagLength now budgets the decoded effective tag identity rather than presentation wrappers or percent-encoded token length. Local, verbatim, and expanded-handle tags remain idempotent at exact custom and default boundaries, while worst-case presentation scanning and cumulative tag storage stay bounded.
• Formatter representation events now include every scalar's resolved effective tag, including implicit string, boolean, integer, float, and null tags. Explicit and non-specific tag state remains distinct, while scalar presentation style remains non-semantic.

Technical Details

• Formatting parses with the repository-owned YAML parser and emits directly from representation nodes rather than projecting through PowerShell objects.
• Standard tags use canonical shorthand, other effective tags use verbatim form, and anchors are renamed deterministically while preserving alias identity.
• The formatter corpus surface passes 400 inputs: all 306 loadable valid inputs reparse with identical canonical representation events and exact second-format bytes, while all 94 invalid inputs remain rejected. The two valid duplicate-key policy cases are not applicable.
• Full local source Pester passed 321 tests with 6 skips; full tests against the generated module passed 323 tests with 4 skips. Source and generated-module parser and PSScriptAnalyzer checks passed.
• Process-PSModule run 30144414180 passed on exact head b9c1ab1, completing 45 jobs successfully with 5 expected skips. It covered source and built-module Pester, PSScriptAnalyzer, formatter and conformance suites on Windows, Linux, and macOS under PowerShell 7.6.3, plus module, documentation, and site builds. Hosted tests totaled 1,441 passed, 0 failed, and 35 skipped out of 1,476.
• Implementation plan progress: every task in Add deterministic YAML stream formatting #5 is complete. The pull request remains draft for review.

Related issues

• Fixes Add deterministic YAML stream formatting #5

[Marius Storhaug (MariusStorhaug)]

Superseded by #47 (release/v1.0.0 consolidation PR). Closing this stacked layer as part of release cleanup.