Control the way lists/arrays are displayed

[felipesere]

I have a script to update a YAML config of a program I wrote.

Given the following snippet (the config is slightly larger):

pull_requests:
  enabled: true
  auth:
    personal_access_token: XYZ
  select: []

When I run the yq like so:

yq -i e '.pull_requests.select += {"repo": "felipesere/dotfiles",}' config.yml
yq -i e '.pull_requests.select += {"repo": "felipesere/journal",}' config.yml

Then the output I get is:

pull_requests:
  enabled: true
  auth:
    personal_access_token: XYZ
  select: [{repo: felipesere/dotfiles}, {repo: felipesere/journal}]

This is fine and my program handles it perfectly well.
But given that I also manually edit the file every now and then, I'd rather yq output the "bullet-style" (?) list like so:

pull_requests:
  enabled: true
  auth:
    personal_access_token: XYZ
  select: 
    - repo: felipesere/dotfiles
    - repo: felipesere/journal

Is there a flag I can set to get this output?

[mikefarah]

Yep - you can use the style operator.

yq e -i 'with(.pull_requests.select; 
  . style= "" |
  . += {"repo": "felipesere/dotfiles"} |
  . += {"repo": "felipesere/journal"}
)' config.yml

pull_requests:
  enabled: true
  auth:
    personal_access_token: XYZ
  select:
    - repo: felipesere/dotfiles
    - repo: felipesere/journal

For what it's worth - yq defaults to the current style of the nodes - and for empty arrays/objects this is necessarily the JSON style (as there's no way of specifying an empty list in bullet points).

I think I will change this in future versions to assume the default yaml style for empty arrays and objects.

[felipesere]

Worked like a charm 💜