Empty maps are marshal'd as JSON

[TomWright]

Hey,

I've noticed that empty maps are marshal'd as JSON documents, for example:

package main

import (
	"bytes"
	"fmt"
	"gopkg.in/yaml.v2"
)

func main() {
	// {}
	encode(map[string]interface{}{})

	// ""
	encode("")

	// a: b
	encode(map[string]interface{}{
		"a": "b",
	})
}

func encode(val interface{}) {
	buffer := new(bytes.Buffer)
	encoder := yaml.NewEncoder(buffer)
	defer encoder.Close()
	if err := encoder.Encode(val); err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(string(buffer.Bytes()))
}

Is this expected?

Is there any way to just have an empty YAML document (a blank string?) output instead?

[niemeyer]

A blank string represents the null YAML value. An empty map is represented with the {} YAML mapping in flow style. These are different YAML values, so we can't exchange one by the other.

[TomWright]

Thanks for that feedback - you learn something new every day!