How to escape indicator characters (i.e. : or - ) in YAML

Question

In a config file, I have a key to which I wish to assign a URL. The problem is that YAML interprets : and - characters as either creating mappings or lists, so it has a pro

Answer 1

If you're using @ConfigurationProperties with Spring Boot 2 to inject maps with keys that contain colons then you need an additional level of escaping using square brackets inside the quotes because spring only allows alphanumeric and '-' characters, stripping out the rest. Your new key would look like this:

"[8.11.32.120:8000]": GoogleMapsKeyforThisDomain

See this github issue for reference.