Comments are often where the operational knowledge of a configuration lives. A short note may explain why a port is unusual, which environment a block belongs to, or what a value should be changed for an emergency. This tool treats comments as text and extracts them in the order they appear. It recognizes standalone comments such as # deployment note and inline comments such as port: 8080 # internal listener, while avoiding the common mistake of treating a hash inside a quoted string as a comment.
Because comment extraction is deliberately text-oriented, it is not the same as YAML parsing. The tool does not need a complete data model to locate comment markers. This can be useful when you are reviewing a draft or intentionally malformed file and still want to recover the notes. The scanner tracks single- and double-quoted regions, so a value like message: "use # literally" does not create a false comment. The result contains the comment text without the leading hash symbol.
The original order is preserved. That matters because comments often follow the structure of a document: a heading comment introduces a section, an inline comment explains one field, and a closing note summarizes a group. Turning those comments into a plain list lets you collect documentation separately, prepare a migration notebook, or audit whether important operational explanations are concentrated in one file. The extractor does not deduplicate repeated notes because each occurrence belongs to a specific source location.
A useful boundary is multiline block content. YAML block scalars can contain lines beginning with hash characters as literal text rather than comments. This simple extractor is designed for ordinary standalone and inline comments and should not be treated as a full round-trip YAML comment AST. When exact source semantics are critical, keep the original file. For routine configuration cleanup and documentation collection, however, the scanner is fast and predictable.
Try the sample by extracting comments, then compare the result with the source. You will see both the file-level note and the inline service note. Add a quoted hash and verify that it does not appear in the output. This demonstrates a broader parsing lesson: a character only has special meaning when it occurs in the right syntactic context. The tool performs this small amount of context tracking locally, without uploading the YAML to another service.
Comments can be treated as lightweight operational documentation, but extracting them removes their original context. A note such as “temporary workaround” means something different depending on which key it followed. For audits, keep the original YAML and use the extracted list as an index rather than as a replacement source. When you need exact source locations, a full syntax tree or editor integration is more appropriate.
The quote-aware behavior is deliberate but intentionally small. It handles the common ambiguity around a hash inside quoted text; it does not attempt to recreate every parser-specific comment rule. That makes it fast for normal files while keeping the result understandable.
If comments are being collected for documentation, consider grouping them manually after extraction by topic such as deployment, security, compatibility, or troubleshooting. The tool keeps source order because that is the only reliable context available in a simple text list. Turning the result into structured documentation is therefore a human editorial step, and preserving the original YAML alongside the list makes that editorial work easier to verify.