I was trying to fix a non-issue with YAML by throwing Ruby gems at it.

nanoc and Jekyll and the like provide YAML metadata for their content files:

---
title:  Some page title
---

# Heading #

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing 
elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et 
dolore magna aliqua.

Google said this is called YAML Frontmatter. So I was looking at a way to parse YAML Frontmatter of plain text files, searching for gems – until I found the laconic answer on StackOverflow: what’s wrong with YAML’s standard features?

In the end, it’s as easy as writing

require 'yaml'
thing = YAML.load_file('some.yml')
puts thing.inspect

That returns just the YAML, the rest is ignored.