In this new post from Lukas Smith he talks about YAML, that handy data storage format and the two methods for its use in PHP (and why he's stuck with one of them).

If you use YAML in PHP, then you had until recently the choice between the C based PECL extension syck or the horrible spyc PHP based implementation. With syck it has the issue that it only supports the core standard and not stuff like merge-key, which is a very very useful extension to the core YAML standard.

He also points out another implementation that the Symfony framework has created - one built around regular expressions (slower, but a "more correct" version).