Im afraid to say that while I somewhat agree with you first statement, the second statement is bad advice. As far as broken dumpers go YAML is one of the worst. Data::Dumper is far more accurate in my testing. One of these days I will get around to publishing my Dumper comparison suite to back these words up. Suffice it to say that YAML will get your Data::Dumper bugreport wrong as well as number of much more simple examples. Some of these weaknesses are even listed in the YAML documentation.

Unfortunately but IMO the current version of YAML is not suitable for much more than config files.

--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....