title: How to escape colons and other special characters in a YAML string?
body: <p>I have the following YAML fragment:</p>
  
  <pre><code>description: |
    "API for bean consuming applications.
    Examples: painted pony, lima bean"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><a href="http://editor.swagger.io/#/" rel="noreferrer">Swagger editor</a> interprets the colon (<code>:</code>) as a special character, despite the quotation marks.</p>
  
  <p>According to the accepted answer to <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11301650/how-to-escape-indicator-characters-i-e-or-in-yaml">this question</a>, the colon should not be treated as special character.</p>
  
  <p>Is this a bug of Swagger or is an escape sequence needed to use the colon in quoted text literals?</p>
  
  <p>I tried to find this out using the <a href="http://yaml.org/spec/" rel="noreferrer">YAML specification</a> but gave up.</p>
  
  <p>How do I have to read that spec to answer the question?</p>
  
  <p>Is there a difference between single quotes (<code>'</code>) and double quotes (<code>"</code>) in YAML?</p>
  
  <p>Does the pipe (<code>|</code>) or the greater than (<code>&gt;</code>) construction only influence the line break handling or the handling of special characters, too?</p>