What kind of data structure is this?

I am pulling recent commits from github and trying to parse it using ruby. I know that I can parse it manually but I wanted to see if there was some package that could turn this into a hash or another data structure.

commits: 
- parents: 
  - id: 202fb79e8686ee127fe49497c979cfc9c9d985d5
  author:
    name: This guy
    login: tguy
    email: tguy@tguy.com
  url: a url
  id: e466354edb31f243899051e2119f4ce72bafd5f3
  committed_date: "2010-07-19T13:44:43-07:00"
  authored_date: "2010-07-19T13:33:26-07:00"
  message: |-
    message
- parents: 
  - id: c3c349ec3e9a3990cac4d256c308b18fd35d9606
  author: 
    name: Other Guy
    login: oguy
    email: oguy@开发者_JAVA百科gmail.com
  url: another url
  id: 202fb79e8686ee127fe49497c979cfc9c9d985d5
  committed_date: "2010-07-19T13:44:11-07:00"
  authored_date: "2010-07-19T13:44:11-07:00"
  message: this is another message

---

This is YAML http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/YAML.html. You can do something like obj = YAML::load yaml_string (and a require 'yaml' at the top of your file, its in the standard libs), and then access it like a nested hash.

YAML is basically used in the ruby world the way people use XML in the java/c# worlds.

---

Looks like YAML to me. There are parsers for a lot of languages. For example, with the YAML library included with Ruby:

data = <<HERE
commits: 
- parents: 
  - id: 202fb79e8686ee127fe49497c979cfc9c9d985d5
  author:
    name: This guy
    login: tguy
    email: tguy@tguy.com
  url: a url
  id: e466354edb31f243899051e2119f4ce72bafd5f3
  committed_date: "2010-07-19T13:44:43-07:00"
  authored_date: "2010-07-19T13:33:26-07:00"
  message: |-
    message
- parents: 
  - id: c3c349ec3e9a3990cac4d256c308b18fd35d9606
  author: 
    name: Other Guy
    login: oguy
    email: oguy@gmail.com
  url: another url
  id: 202fb79e8686ee127fe49497c979cfc9c9d985d5
  committed_date: "2010-07-19T13:44:11-07:00"
  authored_date: "2010-07-19T13:44:11-07:00"
  message: this is another message
HERE

pp YAML.load data

It prints:

{"commits"=>
  [{"author"=>{"name"=>"This guy", "login"=>"tguy", "email"=>"tguy@tguy.com"},
    "parents"=>[{"id"=>"202fb79e8686ee127fe49497c979cfc9c9d985d5"}],
    "url"=>"a url",
    "id"=>"e466354edb31f243899051e2119f4ce72bafd5f3",
    "committed_date"=>"2010-07-19T13:44:43-07:00",
    "authored_date"=>"2010-07-19T13:33:26-07:00",
    "message"=>"message"},
   {"author"=>
     {"name"=>"Other Guy", "login"=>"oguy", "email"=>"oguy@gmail.com"},
    "parents"=>[{"id"=>"c3c349ec3e9a3990cac4d256c308b18fd35d9606"}],
    "url"=>"another url",
    "id"=>"202fb79e8686ee127fe49497c979cfc9c9d985d5",
    "committed_date"=>"2010-07-19T13:44:11-07:00",
    "authored_date"=>"2010-07-19T13:44:11-07:00",
    "message"=>"this is another message"}]}

---

This format is YAML, but you can get the same information in XML or JSON, see General API Information. I'm sure there are libraries to parse those formats in Ruby.

---

Although this isn't exactly what you're looking for, here's some more info on pulling commits. http://develop.github.com/p/commits.html. Otherwise, I think you may just need to manually parse it.