TOON to YAML Converter

Example: TOON input and real YAML output

The output below was generated by the same conversion code the converter uses, run on this sample when the page was built.

employees[4]{id,name,dept,salary,remote}:
  1,Alice Chen,Engineering,128000,true
  2,Bob Okafor,Sales,86000,false
  3,Carla Diaz,Engineering,119000,true
  4,Dan Weiss,Support,64000,false

employees:
  - id: 1
    name: Alice Chen
    dept: Engineering
    salary: 128000
    remote: true
  - id: 2
    name: Bob Okafor
    dept: Sales
    salary: 86000
    remote: false
  - id: 3
    name: Carla Diaz
    dept: Engineering
    salary: 119000
    remote: true
  - id: 4
    name: Dan Weiss
    dept: Support
    salary: 64000
    remote: false

YAML output is 91% larger than the TOON input. The same data is 324 characters as minified JSON and 532 as pretty-printed JSON. Sizes are character counts, not tokens: token counts depend on the model's tokenizer (see the tokenizer comparison). Across larger datasets, TOON averages about 43% fewer tokens than JSON (42.6%) according to the official TOON benchmark.

TOON to YAML: what changes

• Reading TOON: TOON is strict about structure: the [N] in an array header must match the number of rows, and each row needs exactly as many values as the {field} list. Hand-edited TOON that breaks either rule fails to decode.
• Writing YAML: Strings that would otherwise change type on re-read, such as '2021' or '1.0', are quoted. No comments are generated.

Why Convert TOON to YAML?

Use YAML for configuration files, especially in DevOps (Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions). It's more readable than JSON but can have ambiguity with indentation.