trailing-spaces¶

What this rule does¶

Reports whitespace at the end of any line.

Why this matters¶

Invisible drift. Trailing whitespace is invisible in most editors but shows up as a change in every diff, polluting code review.
Editor normalisation. Many editors strip trailing whitespace on save; without this rule, contributors with different editor settings produce conflicting commits.

Configuration¶

[rules.trailing-spaces]
level = "error"

This rule has no options beyond level.

Examples¶

Allowed¶

---
key: value

(No spaces between value and the newline.)

Reported¶

---
key: value···

(Where ··· represents trailing whitespace characters.)

After `ryl --fix`¶

---
key: value

Automatic fixing¶

ryl --fix strips trailing spaces and tabs from each line. The fix is partial by design: lines inside literal/folded block scalars (|/>) and inside multi-line double-quoted scalars are left untouched, because in those contexts trailing whitespace can be part of the parsed scalar value. The diagnostic still fires on those lines so the remaining trailing whitespace is visible after --fix; edit them by hand if you want them clean. Multi-line single-quoted and plain scalars fold trailing whitespace away at parse time, so the fix can safely strip those.

The fix bails (leaves the file untouched) when the input cannot be parsed as YAML, so a broken document is never made worse.

Disable with:

[fix]
fixable = ["ALL"]
unfixable = ["trailing-spaces"]

new-line-at-end-of-file — controls the trailing newline character.
empty-lines — controls fully blank lines (a separate concern from trailing whitespace on content lines).