Comments and space are removed when sorting in yaml

[ffflorian]

Given I have a yaml file with unsorted lines:

variables:
  MY_VARIABLE: 'true'    # Comment 1
  OTHER_VARIABLE: 'true' # Comment 2
  BEST_VARIABLE: 'true'  # Comment 3

I select them and run Sort Everything, I receive this:

variables:
BEST_VARIABLE: "true"
MY_VARIABLE: "true"
OTHER_VARIABLE: "true"

but I was expecting to receive this:

variables:
  BEST_VARIABLE: 'true'  # Comment 3
  MY_VARIABLE: 'true'    # Comment 1
  OTHER_VARIABLE: 'true' # Comment 2

Whitespace being removed is a bit annoying, too, but nothing serious. But I don't want to lose those precious comments! 🙂

Btw: I am using Sort Everything on a daily basis for the last few weeks and beside this bug it's been working flawlessly!

[bennycode]

Thanks for your nice report!

Sorting YAML files is accomplished using "js-yaml". I just asked the library authors to support preserving comments: https://github.com/nodeca/js-yaml/issues/689

Once this feature is available in "js-yaml" I will update my plugin.

[ffflorian]

Perfect, thanks!

[ffflorian]

Seems like the authors don't have the resources to implement this and we are asked to use https://github.com/eemeli/yaml instead.

[bennycode]

The "yaml" package supports preserving comments thanks to full AST parsing but it doesn't support sorting. Luckily another user built sorting and shared how to make it work using "yaml": https://github.com/eemeli/yaml/issues/44#issuecomment-571696527

EDIT: Looks like it is part of their stable versions now -> https://github.com/eemeli/yaml/blob/6e0071179b36329a4d7c98b006c3f838269756d2/tests/doc/stringify.js#L611-L613

[ffflorian]

I tried using sortMapEntries but to no avail. So I went ahead and used the deep sort algorithm instead and created a fix, see #2 🙂

[bennycode]

@ffflorian are you sure that sortMapEntries is not available? For me it seems to work:

const YAML = require('yaml');

const obj = { b: 2, a: 1, c: 3 };

console.log(YAML.stringify(obj, { sortMapEntries: true })); // "a: 1\nb: 2\nc: 3\n"

[ffflorian]

@ffflorian are you sure that sortMapEntries is not available?

The function is available but I wasn't able to receive a sorted Document when using sortMapEntries: true.

[bennycode]

Indeed. It looks like sortMapEntries only works when being used with plain objects (instead of Document.Parsed or string). This has the side effect that comments are being thrown away (because JSON objects don't have comments):

import {parseDocument, stringify} from 'yaml';

// ...

const document = parseDocument(text);
console.log(stringify(document.toJSON(), {sortMapEntries: true}));