Array whitespace is changed between parse and stringify

[pksunkara]

Describe the bug
When I am parsing a YAML and stringifying it afterward, the whitespace in an array changes.

To Reproduce

Before:

on: [pull_request]

After:

on: [ pull_request ]

Expected behaviour

The after file should be the same as before

Versions (please complete the following information):

• node: 22
• yaml: 2.5.0

[eemeli]

It's retained in the document that you get from parseDocument; the formatting is not retained in the JS representation.

[pksunkara]

Oh, that makes sense. Let me see if I can use parseDocument and fix it.

[pksunkara]

I haven't fully confirmed because I am still revamping my other logics, but it looks like the "After" version is adding spaces though.

on: [ pull_request ]

[pksunkara]

Yup, I can confirm that the spaces choice between in the square brackets in array is not being preserved.

[eemeli]

Normalising whitespace is done intentionally; information about it is not retained in the parsed document.

[pksunkara]

In that case,

1. Do you plan to add support for it? (I might be willing to contribute here to this case.)
2. Is this the same cause for Multi line values formatting is not preserved when parsing and stringifying documents #572 too?

[eemeli]

1. No; if you need to retain whitespace, you should be applying your changes to the CST and serialising that: https://eemeli.org/yaml/#working-with-cst-tokens
2. Same root cause, but details differ. I'll comment on that issue separately.

[eemeli]

Closing, as there's nothing actionable here and the current behaviour is intentional.