I have come accross a bug in 1.8.5 ( and some fellow hackers in freenode/#ruby-lang replicated the same problem on 1.8.5
) when serializing
data with YAML, If there is a lone newline char, it will be removed in 
the process of dumping and loading. Here is a example of it in action:

>> YAML::load(YAML::dump({:bug => "\n"}))
=> {:bug=>""}

Hopefully the ruby-core team is able to replicate this problem and
resolve it.

Regards, Brendan Inglese.