JSON ↔ YAML Converter

Pro tips most people learn the hard way

• YAML's biggest gotcha is whitespace — JSON forgives a trailing tab; YAML treats it as a syntax error and breaks your CI deploy. Always paste into a tool like this first before committing config — it's faster than reading a Kubernetes error stack trace at midnight.
• Pro tip: js-yaml auto-quotes strings that look like booleans or numbers ('yes', 'no', '12345', 'true'). That's correct behaviour — without the quotes, YAML 1.1 would parse them as the wrong type. If your YAML port_number suddenly becomes the string "22", that's why.
• YAML→JSON loses comments, anchors (&), aliases (*), and custom tags. Data values survive perfectly; YAML-specific features don't. If your YAML uses DRY anchors heavily, expect the JSON output to repeat the expanded values inline rather than reference them.
• Use YAML for human-edited config (Compose, Kubernetes, Actions) and JSON for machine-to-machine APIs. YAML wins on readability — no commas, no quoting, supports comments. JSON wins on parser availability — every language ships a JSON parser; YAML libraries are an extra dependency.
• Honest take: when YAML breaks in production, the error is usually a tab snuck in (your editor inserted one instead of spaces) or you indented a child by 1 space when the parent expected 2. Round-trip through JSON here and the indentation gets normalised — clean YAML out the other side.