[Yaml-core] Parsing YAML into key:value tree nodes with C library

[David T. <hd...@gm...>]

Apologies in advance: couldn't see a way to reply to prior thread on the 
Sourceforge mailing list site so I'm repeating here.

In 2011 (!), @wuttke and @simonov exchanged email about simpler ways of 
loading yaml files.

*Re: [Yaml-core] can I load entire node trees with the C library libyaml 
? <https://sourceforge.net/p/yaml/mailman/message/28445947/>*
From: Kirill Simonov <xi@re...> - 2011-11-24 15:23:20

Hi Joachim,

A high-level API for libyaml was planned, but never finished.  I wasn't
able to design a satisfactory high-level API for C and it appeared to be
easier to expose the low-level interface and construct the document tree
in a scripting language.

On 11/17/2011 03:37 AM, Joachim Wuttke <j.wuttke@...> wrote:
> So far, the best introduction to libyaml I found is
> the tutorial by Andrew Poelstra at
>     http://wpsoftware.net/andrew/pages/libyaml.html  <http://wpsoftware.net/andrew/pages/libyaml.html>
> It explains two ways of parsing a YAML file, by
> token or by event. Both are pretty low level; if
> I understand correctly, parsing by event is just
> a little less low level than parsing by token.
>
> In contrast, scripting languages offer a much
> simpler way of loading YAML files, basically:
>     y = YAML.load( URL.open("http://yaml.org";) )
>     print y["Projects"]["C/C++ Libraries"][0]
> would yield "libyaml".
>
> Is it possible under C to load in a similar way
> an entire YAML file into a node tree?
>
> There is a yaml_node_type_t, is there any example
> how to use it?
>
> Thanks in advance, Joachim
>


I have a similar question, but in a C program context.  I'm interested 
in parsing YAML into a tree of key:value nodes for subsequent retrieval 
and processing.

For a prior project I used XML and libxml2 
(http://xmlsoft.org/example.html), and while XML has some advantages, 
YAML is much more readable and (perhaps) easier to code.

libxml2 has a number of tools, including an XML parser that yields a 
tree and functions to retrieve values from the tree given a key and 
starting node.

Has anyone created such a package for YAML?  If so, would you be willing 
to share it?

If not, would there be any value to others (apparently not, if no one 
has done it).  It seems that it might be relatively easy to generate the 
tree from the existing run-parse-tree-suite.c code (though I'm 
sufficiently new to YAML, and have a very limited use case, that that's 
probably a naive statement).

Thanks for any help you can offer.

David