New paragraph in yml file with middleman

Question

I'm using middleman for a static website with data in different YAML files. I would like to split some of this data on multiple lines. I've browsed the documentation and different forums but did not find anything that worked for me.

Below is the code of my YAML file. The "|" is supposed to do exactly what I want but the text is still displayed as one huge unique paragraph with normal spaces instead of new lines. Anything obvious I'm missing here?

  day_1:    |
            Marrakech-tizi n’tichka-teloute kasbah-ait ben haddou kasbah-ourazazate-agdz

            We will collect you from your Marrakech accommadation (Riad or hotel)
            at 9 am with a private and air-conditioned transportation then start
            your desert tour by heading towards the high atlas and crossing
            Tizi n’tichka Pass 2260m.

            We follow the one thousand kasbahs road via ounila valley till arriving
            to the Kasbah of teloute, an ancient gathering of old trading caravans
            coming from the large sahara desert.

            Afterwards we visit The earthen Kasbah Of Ait ben Haddou classified as
            UNSECO world Heritage Site and a backdrop of films location as well.
            We take a break to have lunch in Ait ben Haddou Site, we continue our
            journey crossing the Mountains of Anti-atlas and Ourazazate site Or the
            Hollywood of Africa. Arriving to Agdz, which is a small town located
            among palmtree groves, you spend the overnight in one of well-selected
            accommadation with evening and morning meals included.

Answer 1

You don't show how you use the YAML, but chances are that you simply paste the YAML data into HTML, which obviously results in one single paragraph (HTML does not split paragraphs by empty lines like LaTeX or Markdown do, you need to use <p> tags).

I don't know middleman in particular, but for most static site generators, you don't want to have data with internal structure (like paragraphs) in YAML – instead, you want to use whatever markup / templating language the generator provides you with (ERB seems to be the default for middleman; it seems to also support Markdown which would be a way to transform your text into proper HTML paragraphs).

If you really want the data to be YAML, you need map the data's structure (paragraphs in this case) to the YAML structure unless you want to plug in a parser that processes your data before dumping it into the resulting HTML (not sure if that's possible). One way to do this would be to define your data as YAML sequence:

- paragraph 1
  foo bar
- Lorem ipsum
  dolor sit amet

and so on. You would then need to iterate over the sequence and wrap each item into <p>...<p/> when generating the HTML from it.