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Handling YAML Syntax Errors🔗

What if you make a YAML mistake? How can you find it?

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Example YAML Errors🔗

Let me show you an example of a small quest with a few typical YAML errors. You might be able to see that something is off.

Example Quest with YAML Errors
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conversations:
  Jack:
    NPC_options:
      completeQuest:
       text: "Hello, how are you?"
       conditions: !hasEnoughFish

events:
  giveFishObj "objective add fishObj"
  notifyPlayer: 'notify You've completed the quest!'
  addTag: "tag add enoughFish"

You will notice that two events in the events section are written in green instead of blue. That's because of a YAML Syntax error. Do you already see the mistake here? It is simple: There is a colon (:) missing after the key giveFishObj in line 9. Because of the missing colon YAML will fail to parse this file.

But now let's have a look at the same file in VSCode. The YAML Syntax extension will clearly highlight the error:

yaml errors 1

If you hover over the error, you will see more information:

yaml errors 2

Whilst these are quite technical and hard to understand, the highlighting will clearly show you where errors need to be fixed.

Let's have a look at the condition !hasEnoughFish in the conversations part:

yaml errors 3

This will give us an unresolved tag: ... error because special characters like the exclamation mark (!) cannot be written without surrounding (" ") double quotes.

Another common mistake is to use single quotes to surround a value and then also use it inside the value itself like this:

yaml errors 4

Instead, the line should be written like this: notifyPlayer: "notify You've completed the quest!" To prevent those errors we highly recommend to always use double quotes.