yaml_parse_file

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.