Does dasel not preserve the ordering of elements within file types?

[ga-paul-t]

I have been looking around for different go libraries for setting values within different file types. I had discovered Dasel and it felt like a really great fit for a project I was working on.

However, when I use Dasel on different file types, I get unexpected behaviours (unless these are documented somewhere?):

1. YAML, value is updated but the ordering of elements is changed. Dramatically changing the original content of the file
2. TOML, value is updated, but comments are removed, a new line is added at the top of the file and the ordering of elements is changed

I haven't tried XML. But noticed there was an outstanding bug around element ordering. JSON appears to work as expected though.

[TomWright]

This is documented here: https://daseldocs.tomwright.me/notes/file-formatting-and-ordering

It's hard to deal with since maps within go are unordered by nature.

[ga-paul-t]

I should have mentioned that my use case for Dasel was to add support to a project I am building for patching semantic versions within different types of files. I just had a look at https://github.com/pelletier/go-toml and they have some utilities for converting TOML to JSON and back again. This preserves the ordering of elements (at the expense of an extra hop) but means I can use a library like sjson to set individual elements.

Feels terrible writing this, but this may be the best approach.

[TomWright]

I'll take a look to see what might be possible at the weekend.

https://github.com/pelletier/go-toml is actually the toml parser used by dasel. I may be able to adjust the data structure to include ordering information but this needs some research.

[TomWright]

FYI I'm attempting to solve this issue for all supported formats in #289

[ga-paul-t]

FYI I'm attempting to solve this issue for all supported formats in #289

This is awesome news!! If you need any help, happy to lend a hand

[TomWright]

I'll always accept some help