OK, I got it. I still don't see the problem. The examples include strings starting with whitespace (One of the multi-line strings), so that's not a problem. Single line strings start with the first character after the colon and a space. If that happens to be a space character, so be it. Strings are terminated by a newline, so trailing spaces aren't a problem. Quote characters are just characters with no special meaning in this format, so those aren't a problem either. Unless the library implementing this format has a bug, there shouldn't be any issues.