Add support for built-in function 'tostring'

[kenjones-cisco]

Add support for built-in function 'tostring'

The tostring function prints its input as a string. Strings are left unchanged, and all other values are JSON-encoded.

[b-dean]

@mikefarah, this says it was completed ages ago, but I cannot figure out how to do it. Nothing seems to know about tostring and it's not documented.

yq eval --null-input '1 | tostring'

produces:

Error: 1:5: invalid input text "tostring"

If this is complete, how are we supposed to use it?

[kro-cat]

The tostring operator currently doesn't exist in yq. However, for future googlers, I found the @yaml encode filter ( or others like it, see encode-decode from the yq docs ) seems to work for my specific use case:

Expected result:

items:
  - object: |
      array:
        - |
          a: foo
          b: bar

yq filter:

{
  "items": [
    {
      "object": ({
        "array": [
          ({
            "a": (.path.to.foo),
            "b": "bar"
          } | @yaml)
        ]
      } | @yaml)
    }
  ]
}

[mikefarah]

Sorry, this was closed with a whole bunch of other cards that didn't have any traction - will reopen.

[mikefarah]

Will be fixed in the next release

[mikefarah]

Fixed in v4.43.1 :)