YAML Formatter

YAML is a human-readable data format that relies on indentation rather than brackets or braces to express nested structure, which makes it easy to write but sensitive to inconsistent spacing, mixed tabs and spaces, or misaligned list items. This formatter parses your YAML into a JavaScript data structure using the `yaml` library, then re-serializes it with consistent 2-space indentation — normalizing quirky manual formatting into a predictable, uniform style.

Because it goes through a full parse-and-restringify cycle rather than just re-indenting the raw text, the tool also catches structural errors: a genuinely invalid YAML document (bad indentation that creates ambiguous nesting, an unclosed quoted string, or a malformed flow-style collection) produces a parse error rather than a best-effort reformat. One tradeoff of round-tripping through a parser is that comments and some formatting choices from the original file, like explicit flow-style vs. block-style collections, may not be preserved exactly as written.

This comes up often when cleaning up a config file for a CI pipeline, Kubernetes manifest, or Docker Compose file that's been hand-edited into inconsistent indentation, or when double-checking that a YAML snippet is actually valid before committing it.

YAML uses indentation for structure and does not allow tabs for indentation. A common surprise is implicit typing: the unquoted value no, on or yes may be read as a boolean in YAML 1.1, and 1.10 can become the number 1.1.

Because the document is re-serialized, comments and some formatting choices may not be preserved. Compare the output with your original before replacing a config file.