Ruby YAML write without aliases

Question

I am writing data to yaml files from ruby and I frequently get aliases dotted about the file. Things like:

- &id001  
  somekey: somevalue
- *id001

In my case I am using the yaml files to aid readability and add names to values in the files as the existing data is just | separated values with no keys. How can I prevent the yaml files being written with aliases?

[Edit]

For further clarification here is an example of the type of data and problem.

The original data looks like:

Ham|2.00|1
Eggs|0.50|12
Milk|2.00|2

And I have written a ruby script to convert it to yaml, which also looks at an sql file to get the appropriate names. The yaml file looks like:

---
- !omap
  - name: Ham
  - &id001
    price: 2.00
  - quantity: 1
- !omap
  - name: Eggs
  - price: 0.50
  - quantity: 12
- !omap
  - name: Milk
  - *id001
  - quantity: 1

This causes a problem in large data sets because the aliases may be nowhere near each other and it makes it hard to read.

Answer 1

Why are you using YAML::Omap's?

A much simpler and cleaner solution would be to first read the data into an array of hashes, as such:

a = [ {'name' => 'Ham', 'price' => 2.00, 'quantity' => 1},
      {'name' => 'Eggs', 'price' => 0.50, 'quantity' => 12},
      {'name' => 'Milk', 'price' => 2.00, 'quantity' => 2} ]

and then just do:

a.to_yaml

resulting in:

--- 
- price: 2.0
  name: Ham
  quantity: 1
- price: 0.5
  name: Eggs
  quantity: 12
- price: 2.0
  name: Milk
  quantity: 2

Would that work for you?