Question

I have 1000s of XML files with complex nested structures.

I need to see the XML files as plain text and be able to read back the data from TXT.

So far, XML-to-YAML has served the purpose perfectly.

YAML formats my content neatly enough and it can be read back.

All good so far.

Recently the XML schema has got more complicated though, and YAML is hitting its own limits, for the specifics see the many articles “against” YAML on Google.

I am not against YAML myself, I am in favour of it actually. It has served me well. Until now.

Here is a simple question: has YAML been superseded by a better “looks good in plain text and is meant for humans to read” system? What’s the successor to YAML?

If you need the details of the XML schema that changed to answer this, fine… I can add them. It’s optional sections with repetitions, with nested items, with lists of graphs of 3 nodes, with references to IDs to objects defined earlier (think: social security # to refer to a person), etc.

The programming language is Java.

Note: I could transform the XML into TXT using XSLT but how would I read the data back short of defining my own parser/grammar?

Answer 1

Here are a few alternatives:

• Candle Object Notation

• JavaFX Object Notation

• ASON

• BSON

• PSON

• Enamel

• ASN.1

• RSS 3.0

• SPARQL S-Expressions(SSE)