APM: YAML url mappings

[Sam Foster]

So, after this month's very intersting YAML presentation, I thought I'd 
give it a whirl with a little 404 handler I'm making. It needs to 
attempt to lookup a (bad) url, or fragment of the url in a simple old => 
new hash structure, eg
{
   '/some/old/url.html' 	=> '/new/location/for/url.html',
   '/old/dir'		=> '/new/dir'
}
Having a nice (safe) human editable datafile to store this would be 
ideal.. a nice spot for YAML I thought.
Except the obvious doesn't work:
---
/some/old/url.html: /new/location/for/url.html
/old/dir: /new/dir

it doesn't like '/' as a starting character (or '~,' or '.'. Is it 
matching with something like /\s*\w+/ ?.. must take a look.)

I looked through the YAML perldocs, and the spec and found nothing about 
illegal or allowed characters that might explain this. Does that make it 
a bug? Anyone have any thoughts, workarounds or suggestions?

Right now, I've prepended 'ROOT' so I get
---
ROOT/some/old/url.html: ROOT/new/location/for/url.html

which works just fine - and I strip it back off before I return the url 
to the user... But kind of dirties my data a little. The goal is to keep 
the data format clean and intuitive, and leave any complexity in the 
script. I can obviously write my own "parser" or use Config::Auto or 
something else.. but I've just been telling everyone at work all about 
YAML and need to not look silly :)

thanks,
Sam