Ok, so this one had me stuck for ages, and I thought I’d share what went wrong. I was trying to save strings into YAML, something like the following:

  before_string: x
  after_string: y

I naively thought that this was fine, but if you’re familiar with YAML, you’d know that this creates problems.

After going through the YAML specs, I found the following:

Regexp:
 y|Y|yes|Yes|YES|n|N|no|No|NO
|true|True|TRUE|false|False|FALSE
|on|On|ON|off|Off|OFF

In short, any of the above values are automagically converted by YAML into a boolean type. That is, 0 or 1. Whoops.

One extremely fast and simple solution was to opt for JSON persistence instead. It got rid of the problem and seems to be more widely adopted. Who’da think it?

NB: Perhaps it was foolish of me to use YAML this way, but hey, I learned something! Maybe you did too?