Case Sensitivity in deserialized dictionaries

[jmoleary]

I am replacing some very YAML code with YamlDotNet. The old code manually reads Yaml into a Dictionary<string, string> and parses the values (ugh). The dictionaries use StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase for the keys comparer and the values are raw yaml.

My first step using YamlDotNet shows that opening up a file like this yields Dictionary<object, object> It would be much easier for me to plug this into the rest of my codebase if I could make it instead return Dictionary<string, object>, for the top level result and for child dictionaries. Making it also use StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase would be an added bonus, if possible.

Is there a way to achieve this with some sort of configuration option of the Deserializer?

Here is how I load it now.

var builder = new DeserializerBuilder().IgnoreUnmatchedProperties();
var yaml = builder.Build();
using var inStream = File.OpenText(YamlFilePath);
if (yaml.Deserialize(inStream) is not Dictionary<object, object> map)
    throw new InvalidOperationException("scan does not have a recognizable map");

I see options like DeserializerBuilder.WithNamingConvention and "custom type discriminators" but I don't see how I can use them to achieve this.

[EdwardCooke]

The reason it’s an <object, object> is because the yaml spec does not require the keys to be a string. There’s no option to force that to be a string in the library because of that.

[jmoleary]

I should add that my eventual solution to this problem was to create a class that implements IObjectFactory and specify it in the DeserializerBuilder.WithObjectFactory function (during the creation of my Deserializer) to plug it in. Whenever my ObjectFactory is asked for Dictionary<object, object> I instead make it instead return Dictionary<string, object> which gets the property case-insensitive comparer in its constructor.
Not sure if that is a good solution, it feels like a hack, but it works.