Spyc News

After almost two years of development, Spyc 0.3 seems to have a stable release. The 0.3 beta branch introduced an impressive speed-up, and that should now be backed up with stability. This became possible with hard work of numerous developers over the world who kept sending bug reports and fixes for intricate problems all over these two years.

The plans for Spyc development are clear:

1) First of all, the simple testing mechanism of Spyc is now a bit outdated. In the following weeks I'm going to switch testing facilities to some reliable PHP Unit Testing framework. This should also allow Spyc to have a more thorough test coverage.... read more

This release cannot boast a bunch of new functions, the only change that can matter for the end user is big speed difference. However, much work underlies the 0.3 release (that's actually why it's 0.3, not 0.2.x). The engine for this release was rewritten from scratch to make it parse YAML files in just one pass (whatever that means). If you were concerned with Spyc's low speed, you'll feel an improvement this time.... read more

A new Spyc package is here for the year 2007 ;-) We had some problems down there with the 0.2.4 version failing on its self-tests for PHP5 version, but now these problems seem to be dead and buried.

Our plans for the first days (weeks?) of the new year include dealing with bugs currently present in the tracker and finding new ones ;-)

Many thanks for your feedback and support. Spyc won't be dead ;-)

Spyc is alive and well! Long live Spyc! :)

Some new maintainers have been found, and we're working on getting a new release out the door.

The new release, 0.2.4, will feature speed improvements and bugfixes. Comments and suggestions are appreciated.

I wrote Spyc in June '05 (just over a year ago) because I was a full time PHP developer who had gotten a taste of YAML through Ruby and the Rails framework. YAML was (is) nice. Very nice. If only there were a pure PHP YAML parser I could slide into some of my personal and (small) work projects. There wasn't, so I wrote one with no knowledge of how Real Parsers work.

Since then Spyc has been downloaded over 1,000 times and has been included in some cool frameworks like Symfony and Livepipe. Hey, it even got me a job, which in turn got me my current job. ... read more

So, yikes.

I was doing a little vanity surfing the other day (you know, googling "php yaml" and seeing what comes up) when I found this post ( http://www.sooey.com/journal/2006/01/13/82/ ) by one of the Guesswork gents.

While I don't speak Japanese, a bug find is universal: a certain bit of YAML that (potentially) used to work no longer worked in one of the Spyc .2 releases.

The YAML in question: - {name: "Foo, Bar's", age: 20}... read more

changes:
0.2.2:
- Implemented Mustafa Kumas' changes:
- Improved regex in _inlineEscape() method.
- Improved handling of escaped single and double quotes within strings.

A slight API change for Spyc might be coming in the near future. Stay tuned.

How are those New Year's Resolutions coming? Yeah? Yeah.

I only had one: make Spyc better. So here's another small update to keep your YAML eating bellies satisfied.

This time around we've got a PHP5 strict version, spyc.php5, which should do the trick for those of you who are anti-"var."

Spyc now properly dumps strings with "\n"s in 'em. Try it out.

More boolean support and other tasty tidbits, as well. Check the changelog.... read more

Gentlemen. Version 0.2 is live. Bug fixes, like one would expect, plus an itty-bitty improvement in dump() for generating YAML from an array.

Also, we moved to http://spyc.sourceforge.net. Not that big of a deal. I hope someone told Google... that guy is always late to the party.

Until next time.

Ever since why let everyone in on YAML's merge key secret over at http://redhanded.hobix.com/bits/yamlSMergeKey.html [RedHanded], I've been feeling like a hypocrite. In Spyc's readme, I color the purpose of Spyc as, among other things, being a parser "...which understands a usable subset of the YAML spec..." In the same file I boast that Spyc understands a YAML file that "...has features way beyond the scope of what normal config files might require." But it can't handle merge keys! He made me a liar!... read more

The hits just keep on coming. Through the goodness of his heart, creative designer Adam Wood (of http://badcircle.com fame) has given the Spyc website a makeover. Check it out at http://ozmm.org/spyc/

The first pure PHP YAML parser is here. The beta of our alpha with a few bug fixes, Spyc 0.1(.1), was recently released. Download it, check it out, throw it into some web applications, and let us know what you think. Improvements are not only welcomed, they are encouraged.