Overview

Having a sample data file, we explore some of the options we have to access a specific item.

For the data file projects.yml located in /_data/projects.yml:

- project: funtime
  url: www.funtime.url
  description: This is really fun

- project: supertime
  url: www.supertime.url
  description: This is really super

How can we access the data item whose project name is funtime?

Using an index

If we know the data item index, we can access them directly, in this case it is located in the position “0”:

{{site.data.projects[0]}}

Output:

    {“project”=>”funtime”, “url”=>”www.funtime.url”,“description”=>”This is really fun”}

Iterating

Iterating through all the data looking for an attribute

{% for item in site.data.projects %}
    {% if item.project == "funtime" %}
    {{item}}
    {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

Outputs:

{“project”=>”funtime”, “url”=>”www.funtime.url”, “description”=>”This is really fun”}

Changing the data file

The above data file can be optimized to make it more elegant and use the project name as their key:

funtime:
  url: www.funtime.url
  description: This is really fun

supertime:
  url: www.supertime.url
  description: This is really super

This way we can access each of the items directly:

{{site.data.projects['funtime']}}

So it would output:

{“url”=>”www.funtime.url”, “description”=>”This is really fun”}