How to strip characters (in this case dashes "-") from YAML arrays using yq

Question

Say I have a YAML array and I want to read the items into a bash array:

yaml='- this - is - a - yaml - array'
declare -a arr;
readarray -t arr < <(echo "$yaml" | yq -r '.');
echo ${arr[@]}

The bash array entries retain the - symbols.

How might I strip out the - symbols using yq?

---

Using Mike Farrah's yq (v4.31.2) but interested in answers for Andrey Kislyuk's too.

Answer 1

yaml='- this - is - a - yaml - array'

I suspect this isn't what you think it is in yaml. This is an array with a single element string with the value "this - is - a - yaml - array".

You need newline characters between each element.

The "-" is being printed because yq is printing the array yaml node rather than the child elements individually. You just need to splat the results:

echo "- this\n- is\n- a\n- yaml\n- array" | yq '.[]'

this
is
a
yaml
array

disclaimer: I wrote yq