In ruamel how to start a string with '*' with no quotes like any other string

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yaml =  ruamel.yaml.YAML()
yaml.indent(mapping=4)
test_yaml_file = open("test.yaml") 
test_file = yaml.load(test_yaml_file)
# test = LiteralScalarString('*clvm')
test = "*testing"
test_file['test_perf'] = test
with open("test.yaml", 'w') as changed_file:
    yaml.dump(test_file, changed_file)

In this the expected output was

test_perf: *testing

but the output has been

test_perf: '*testing'

how to achieve this using ruamel?

ruamel.yaml pyyaml
1 Answers

Your scalar starts with a *, which is used in YAML to indicate an alias node. To prevent *testing to be interpreted as an alias during loading (even though the corresponding anchor (&testing) is not specified in the document), the scalar must be quoted or represented as a literal or folded block scalar.

So there is no way to prevent the quotes from happening apart from choosing to represent the scalar as literal or folded block scalar (where you don't get the quotes, but do get the | resp. >)

You should not worry about these quotes, because after loading you'll again have the string *testing and not something that all of a sudden has extra (unwanted) quotes).

There are other characters that have special meaning in YAML (&, !, etc.) and when indicated at the beginning of a scalar cause the scalar to be quoted. What the dump routine actually does is dump the string and read it back and if that results in a different value, the dumper knows that quoting is needed. This also works with strings like 2022-01-28, which when read back result in a date, such strings get quoted automatically when dumped as well (same for strings that look like floats, integers, true/false values).

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