# yq v4.53.4

- Product: yq (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/yq)
- Vendor: yq
- Date: 2026-08-19
- Version: v4.53.4
- Original notes: https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/tag/v4.53.4
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/yq/releases/v4.53.4

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **fixed** — Close input files after processing each one
- **fixed** — Fixed non string HCL string keys
- **fixed** — Fixed heap allocation bug
- **fixed** — Fix deleting commented empty list YAML output
- **fixed** — Fix (has) return false for negative array indices
- **fixed** — Fix (sort): avoid int64 overflow comparing large integers
- **fixed** — Preserve correct parent references in explode merge anchor reconstruction
- **changed** — Improve Guard ExpressionParser initialization with sync.Once
- **fixed** — Reject negative indent instead of panicking
- **fixed** — Parse signed hex and octal integers
- **fixed** — Skip UTF-8 BOM when processing front matter
- **fixed** — Fix !!merge tag regression for yq
- **changed** — Default to yaml when a file's extension is not a recognised format

- Close input files after processing each one (#2796) (#2808) Thanks @MsfPablo
- Fixed non string HCL string keys (#2795)
- Fixed heap allocation bug (#2809) Thanks @MsfPablo
- Fix deleting commented empty list YAML output (#2765) Thanks @dpersek
- Fix (has) return false for negative array indices (#2769) Thanks @maximilize
- Fix (sort): avoid int64 overflow comparing large integers (#2771) Thanks @maximilize
- Fix: preserve correct parent references in explode merge anchor reconstruction (#2730) Thanks @vomba
- Improve Guard ExpressionParser initialization with sync.Once (#2789) Thanks @arcaven
- Fix: reject negative indent instead of panicking (#2746) Thanks @StressTestor
- Fix: parse signed hex and octal integers (#2749) Thanks @StressTestor
- Fix: skip UTF-8 BOM when processing front matter (#2751) Thanks @StressTestor
- Fix !!merge tag regression for yq  (#2705) Thanks @W-Floyd
- Default to yaml when a file's extension is not a recognised format (#2785) Thanks @devthedevil
- Bumped dependencies