Question

I have a hash table of twitter users.

tweeter1: @jack
tweeter2: @jill
tweeter3: @john

But because of @, I can’t YAML.load the file.

The error it throws is Psych::SyntaxError: (<unknown>): did not find expected node content while parsing a flow node at line 1 column 11

How do you use string literal for @ in YAML?

Answer 1

Just double quote your values:

tweeter1: "@jack"
tweeter2: "@jill"
tweeter3: "@john"

Then you should get the expected Hash when you read it:

{
    "tweeter1" => "@jack",
    "tweeter2" => "@jill",
    "tweeter3" => "@john"
}

You can always go to yaml.org for details on the YAML format.