String values that are legal YAML 1.1 boolean values are de-quoted by --prettyprint

[dwd]

Describe the bug

See: http://yaml.org/type/bool.html

String values that are treated as implicitly boolean by some processors are treated as strings by yq, and pretty-printing therefore removes the quotes, causing the tag to implicitly change.

This is surprising, because it looks to me as though the underlying go-yaml library has the existing support for this.

Version of yq: 4.11.2
Operating system: Linux
Installed via: go get github.com/mikefarah/yq/v4

Input Yaml
Concise yaml document(s) (as simple as possible to show the bug, please keep it to 10 lines or less)
input.yml:

a_string_value: "yes"

Command
The command you ran:

yq -Pe e '.' input.yml

Actual behavior

a_string_value: yes

Expected behavior

a_string_value: "yes"

Additional context

Similarly, b: yes run through yq -Pe e 'b | tag' results in !!str, whereas it should arguably be !!bool - this matters rather less than the output above.

It looks like this relates to YAML 1.1, rather than YAML 1.2, so this probably isn't a "bug" in the "you did something wrong" sense, but it's problematic because existing processors (including parts of Docker) appear to treat an unquoted "yes" as implicitly a !!bool.

[mikefarah]

yeah this is definitely a YAML 1.1 vs 1.2 thing - the yaml parser yq uses is for 1.2 - so 'yes' is never a boolean in its eyes.

The prettyPrint flag could be updated to leave the existing styling of any nodes with yes/no/on/off values so it doesn't break 1.1 - would that work?

[thatsk]

same with me also.

thatsk@example: ~$ cat kunal.yaml 
test: "on"
key: "off"
thatsk@example: ~$ yq4 -Pe e '.' kunal.yaml 
test: on
key: off

[thatsk]

i need the quotes but pretty print is removing it

[mikefarah]

Fixed in 4.12.0