Bill Guindon wrote:
> Do I need the colons before the field names?  I'm not doing that now.

Oh, not at all. I just did that because I tend to use symbols rather 
than strings when I am describing attr_accessors and the like. But you 
can use strings for better readability in the yaml file.

> I'll give that a shot, was wondering if there was a way to auto create
> objects from the YAML load, but yeah, I could loop through them and do
> it that way.  I'll see how it goes.

If you want to autocreate, you can use the syntax for defining the class 
of objects, but the YAML file will look messier. You can see how it will 
look by creating some objects in ruby code, and them calling #to_yaml on 
them. F'rexample:

   require 'yaml'

   class C
     attr_accessor :x
   end

   c = C.new
   c.x = {:foo => ["bar"] }

   puts c.to_yaml

The output is

--- !ruby/object:C
x:
   :foo:
     - bar

If you YAML.load this, it will create an instance of C.

Alternately  maybe there is some hook in the YAML parser that lets you 
say "instantiate all hashes with objects of class C", but that seems 
problematic if you use hashes elsewhere in the data.

Another option is to extend the YAML parser to recognize some custom 
types that have less cumbersome syntax than "!ruby/object:YourClass". 
You can find examples in yaml/types.rb in your ruby lib dir.