JSON to YAML conversion - option for explicit string quoting

[harrel56]

Hey community,

I'm using yq -Poy file.json for conversion to YAML and for example:

{
  "date": "12:00:00"
}

is parsed to:

date: 12:00:00

Is there any option to explicitly quote all string values? So the output would become:

date: '12:00:00' # or "12:00:00"

TBH I don't know if parsing to this form wouldn't cause some troubles with escaping?

And this is causing issues for me as unquoted 12:00:00 is being parsed (java, snakeyaml) as a number (43200, number of seconds if I'm not wrong).

Thanks in advance for any help on this!

[mikefarah]

Yep, you can give it a style expression to put values in double quotes, see https://mikefarah.gitbook.io/yq/operators/env-variable-operators#envsubst-options for details.

yq -Poy '.date style="double"'  file.json 

[harrel56]

TBH I cannot make it work directly when converting between JSON and YAML, I have to do this in 2 separate steps:

yq -Poy file.json | yq '.date style="single"'

Also, it'd be great if I could set style on conversion operation and apply the quotations only to actual JSON strings. I see there is a kind operator but it looks like it's not able to distinguish strings apart from e.g. numbers. Probably I would imagine something like this:

yq -Poy '.. | select(kind == "string") style="single"' file.json 

But still the 2 step approach works for my case, so it's all fine. Thank you for your help!