Dear YQ, Why do you eat my Comments?

[rhatfield-bushel]

Dear YQ,

I have tried many permutations of your command, and yet; no joy.

I would like to nest an entire YAML file within a single object, and I can't seem to get my point across.

How can I satiate your hunger? Are you not entertained?

I attempt the following

cat test.yaml <<'EOF'
# Here's the first comment
first: 'first value'
# Here's the second comment
second: 'second value'
# Here's the third comment
third: 'third comment'
EOF
yq e '{"prefix":.}' test.yaml

And you still give me

prefix:
  first: 'first value'
  # Here's the second comment
  second: 'second value'
  # Here's the third comment
  third: 'third comment'

How do I get you to leave my comments alone?

Sincerely Yours,
A confused developer

[mikefarah]

Dear confused developer,

I am greedily eating your first comment because I think it's a document header (its pre-processed as part of a workaround/hack for a go-yaml issue).

My appetite is never sated, however you can force me not to eat you header by:

yq e --header-preprocess=false  '{"prefix":.}' test.yaml 

Sincere apologies,
yq

[rhatfield-bushel]

So this fixed my issue better than expected, kinda.

Using the following test.yaml file

# yaml-language-server: $schema=./values.schema.yaml

# Here's the first comment
first: "first value"
# Here's the second comment
second: "second value"
# Here's the third comment
third: "third comment"

And the command yq e --header-preprocess=false '{"prefix":.}' test.yaml still strips off the first line, but retains the important comments in this case

prefix:
  # Here's the first comment
  first: "first value"
  # Here's the second comment
  second: "second value"
  # Here's the third comment
  third: "third comment"

I'm guessing this has to do with the aforementioned document header preprocessor workaround?

In any case, that schema would no longer be valid so it works out well, thanks for the help!

[chr1shung]

Hi I came across this issue today, my use case is trying to parse a docker-compose.yml and get a list of services name. For example:

services:
  # This is a
  A:
    image: repo/A
  # This is b
  B:
    image: repo/B
  # This is c
  C:
    image: repo/C

I was running yq --header-preprocess=false '.services | keys' sample.yml but it still ate the comment:

# This is a
- A
# This is b
- B
# This is c
- C

Is there any way to get rid of it ?
Thanks for the help

[mikefarah]

sorry which comment is it eating? they all look present to me?

[chr1shung]

Sorry it seems I misunderstood OP's question.
What I tried to ask is how to make yq not show the comment, thanks

[mikefarah]

Ah - in that case take a look here: https://mikefarah.gitbook.io/yq/operators/comment-operators#remove-strip-all-comments

I should/will eventually add a --no-comments flag as a short hand for this - just haven't got around to it yet sorry!

[chr1shung]

Thanks for the help !