Fix YAML parsing errors in WebGen
After a clean install of Mac OS X Yosemite I’ve had to reinstall much of my development environment. This process was mostly beneficial as I moved to the latest and greatest tooling but several of my static websites leverage the prior major version of Thomas Leitner’s Webgen and getting version 0.5.x up and running has been a challenge.
After working through several Ruby & Gem issues I ran into a particularly opaque error when executing webgen on a project that previously generated without issue: “(): found character that cannot start any token while scanning for the next token”
This error is usually a sign that your content contains tab characters but I’d already ensured that wasn’t the case. Instead of diving deep into the workings of the libraries at play I was able to use this post from Thomas to resolve the issue by reverting to the syck TAML implementation instead of its replacement. Problem solved!