DRY Yaml

For the class that I’m teaching this Fall, I created a Jekyll site to hold the course materials. I’m in the camp that Jekyll can do anything and I want to use it always.

While working on variables in the config, I wondered if there’s a better way to write the following:

coursename: Intermediate Interactive Design
description: Intermediate Interactive Design, Informatics Department, University at Albany, Fall 2014

After some “concatenate Yaml” googling, I found that you can’t concatenate, but you can repeat nodes.

I tidied up and followed the patterns:

coursename: &course_name Intermediate Interactive Design
description:
  - \*course_name
  - Informatics Department
  - University at Albany
  - Fall 2014

Repeating nodes works by creating a keyword and placing it in the variable to be repeated. In this case, I used &course_name. Next, I dropped *course_name where I want &course_name to be repeated.

You set the variable with &keyword and recall it using *keyword.

Repeated nodes (objects) are first identified by an anchor (marked with the ampersand - “&”), and are then aliased (referenced with an asterisk - “*”) thereafter. — Yaml Spec

You can repeat more than one node:

coursename: &course_name Intermediate Interactive Design
semester: &this_semester Fall 2014
description:
  - \*course_name
  - Informatics Department
  - University at Albany
  - \*this_semester

Now I can use either variable as I normally would and the repeated node will slide in smooth.

You might notice that I moved the description to an array. This gives me a little more flexibility with output.

Now I can use {{ site.description | join: ", " }} or even {{ site.description | join: "<br>" }} to output the array nicely.