(PECL yaml >= 0.4.0)
yaml_parse_file — Parse a YAML stream from a file
Convert all or part of a YAML document stream read from a file to a PHP variable.
filenamePath to the file.
pos
Document to extract from stream (-1 for all
documents, 0 for first document, ...).
ndocs
If ndocs is provided, then it is filled with the
number of documents found in stream.
callbacksContent handlers for YAML nodes. Associative array of YAML tag => callable mappings. See parse callbacks for more details.
Returns the value encoded in filename in appropriate
PHP type o false in caso di fallimento. If pos is -1 an
array will be returned with one entry for each document found
in the stream.
Processing untrusted user input with yaml_parse_file()
is dangerous if the use of unserialize() is enabled for
nodes using the !php/object tag. This behavior can be
disabled by using the yaml.decode_php ini setting.
Be aware that when parsing yaml an unquoted Y value will become a boolean trueThis may be desired or undesired behavior depending on context- chr_name: X // becomes string X- chr_name: Y // becomes boolean true[ [chr_name => X], [chr_name => true],]You definitely don't want chromosome Y becoming chromosome 1 (true) as happened to me, so heads up!As Jesse Donat mentioned the type will be infered automatically. To enforce some type you can use the callback facility like this:<?phpfunction cb_yaml_date($value, $tag, $flags) { return new DateTime($value);}$yaml = <<<YAMLevent1: name: My Event date: !date 25.05.2001YAML;$ndocs = 0;$data = yaml_parse($yaml, 0, $ndocs, array('!date' => 'cb_yaml_date'));print_r($data);?>The above example will output something similar to: Array ( [event1] => Array ( [name] => My Event [date] => DateTime Object ( [date] => 2001-05-25 00:00:00 [timezone_type] => 3 [timezone] => Europe/Berlin ) ) )BTW if you want to have large numbers you are probably using BC Math. Thus, you simple enclose your number in quotes:<?php$yaml = <<<YAMLlargenumber: '14695760472279668267313200104308'YAML;?>This is entirely dependent on type detection - as far as I can find there is no way to force a type and for instance when you have a very long integer as a value - in my case 1313035348823 it gets limited to 2147483647 - PHP's max integer.