Numeric text data is getting mangled

[gharris999]

Given:

#!/bin/bash
LDEV='wlx4cedfb37602e'
ESSID='SomeSSID'
WPA_PSK='123456789012'

yq n "network.wifis.${LDEV}.access-points.${ESSID}.password" "$WPA_PSK"

..yields:

network:
  wifis:
    wlx4cedfb37602e:
      access-points:
        SomeSSID:
          password: 1.23456789012e+11

..which won't do, of course. I need to store that wifi passkey string so that it can be interpreted literally. The interpreting program, netplan, isn't going to know that it needs to convert that scientific notation back into a string.

[gharris999]

..this is with yq version 2.4.0

[gharris999]

So, I haven't looked at the source code yet, as I'm completely unfamiliar with Go, but looking at:

https://golang.org/pkg/fmt/

..I'm guessing that create/write/update actions add data using the %v format, which defaults to %g, which in turn defaults to %e for data interpreted as large exponents.

Perhaps yq could get an optional --fmt=%x flag argument for reads/writes that would allow run-time control over how data is interpreted and expressed. For my purposes, above, --fmt=%s would do nicely, e.g.:

yq n --fmt='%s' "network.wifis.${LDEV}.access-points.${ESSID}.password" "$WPA_PSK"

..to force $WPA_PSK to be interpreted as string data, not as a large number.

For more complicated string data, fmt even supports %q, "a double-quoted string safely escaped with Go syntax", which presumably would allow reading and writing virtually string data.

[gharris999]

Actually,

yq n "network.wifis.${LDEV}.access-points.${ESSID}.password" "\"${WPA_PSK}\""

..yields:

network:
  wifis:
    wlx4cedfb37602e:
      access-points:
        SomeSSID:
          password: "123456789012"

..which netplan is OK with. So maybe this isn't the show-stopper issue I thought it was.

[AndiDog]

Simpler test case:

$ echo 'version: 0.2' >Chart.yaml
$ yq w -i Chart.yaml version "0.10"
$ cat Chart.yaml
version: 0.1

So I had this nice one-liner to bump my helm chart version, and suddenly it jumps from 0.9 to 0.1...

[hobti01]

This is a sneaky one! It bit me today when a commit sha happened to have only numbers:

$ yq w -i helm/$NAME/values.yaml 'image.tag' $CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA
$ cat helm/$NAME/values.yaml
...
image:
  tag: 1.234556e+06
...

Thanks for the workaround @gharris999 !

[AdamSimpson]

I've been bit by this as well, a fix would be much appreciated.

[mikefarah]

Just released a new version of yaml that fixes this - it's a pretty significant update so it's still in beta: https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/tag/3.0.0-beta

[mikefarah]

Fixed in https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/tag/3.0.1