Indent should be consistent

[crdoconnor]

Indent should be consistent

[daheise]

I concur with option two. Particular choice of indent is not as important as consistent indent.

[crdoconnor]

Yes, this is a good idea.

[crdoconnor]

I meant to do something about this but I got hit by a bout of analysis paralysis and never picked it up. I'm not sure which of the following is the best course of action:

1. Hard code a 2 space indent requirement - advantage - simple, straightforward, makes YAML consistent everywhere, disadvantages - maybe good reason to have other indent?

2. Simply hard code a requirement that the indention following the first parsed indent should be consistent with the first parsed indent and throw an exception if it isn't.

3. Make indent a parameter in load and raise exception if it is violated.

4. Something else

@guyskk @daheise @Carpetsmoker : comments?

[guyskk]

Sadly, I prefer 4 space indent... since python use 4 space indent.
I'm glad to see any standard(like PEP8) says YAML should indent 2(4) spaces(no matter 2 spaces or 4 spaces), and everyone follows the same indent.

I like solution 2: Always follow your heart, be consistent from beginning to end.

[arp242]

Two spaces seems to be the de-facto standard, as far as I know. It's also what the YAML spec uses. But perhaps this "de-facto" standard differs per programming environment.

One additional option would be to required two spaces, and parse a Vim/Emacs like comment block (# vim ts=4 and whatever the Emacs syntax is) and use the value from that. This is what e.g. Python does for the file encoding.

That being said, option two ("should be consistent with the first parsed indent") is probably the best.

[crdoconnor]

Option two it is. Will implement this today. Thanks guys.

[arp242]

One issue is that this is difficult to really do correct btw. For example this:

foo:
  - one
  - two
    - three

is (yaml module):

{'foo': ['one', 'two - three']}

or (strictyaml module):

YAML(OrderedDict([('foo', ['one', 'two - three'])]))

There are probably other similar cases.

In other words, you never quite know if the indentation is consistent (this is a problem in general, you can never know what the user intended, but even more so with yaml due to its relaxed parsing).

[crdoconnor]

Ugh, that's horrible. I didn't even realize that that would parse.

[crdoconnor]

Oops. This was fixed a on v0.11.0 by the way. I forgot to close here.