Hi, I'm trying to use YAML to load and store a whole bunch of data (with a lot of repetition). Anchors and aliases seem to be the way froward, but I am runing into a few problems. Suppose I have the following YAML document: --- anchor: &id001 - sample1 : name: s1 freq: 0.27 - sample2 : name: s2 freq: 0.27 alias: *id001 held in a string (str). I then load it x=YAML.load(str) => {"anchor"=>[{"name"=>"s1", "freq"=>0.27, "sample1"=>nil}, {"name"=>"s2", "freq"=>0.27, "sample2"=>nil}], "alias"=>nil} Why does my alias always come out as nil. Where do I need to put the anchor in order that the alias picks up the entire list. This is the output I desire => {"anchor"=>[{"name"=>"s1", "freq"=>0.27, "sample1"=>nil}, {"name"=>"s2", "freq"=>0.27, "sample2"=>nil}], "alias"=> [{"name"=>"s1", "freq"=>0.27, "sample1"=>nil}, {"name"=>"s2", "freq"=>0.27, "sample2"=>nil}]} Thanks Steve