Quarto rendering blocked on all machines by YAML error

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I'm having the strangest problem. I was working on a Quarto presentation today on my laptop. It was rendering fine.

Then I got home, fired up my desktop, and tried rendering a Quarto presentation that I found on the web. I suppose there was a problem in the header, since I got the message "ERROR: YAMLException: end of the stream or a document separator is expected (3:1)". Now no matter what I do to try and edit the file, it gives me the same message, even when I remove line 3 altogether.

Worse yet, when I try to render any other Quarto file on my desktop, I get the exact same message and can't go any further.

Worse worse yet, when I tried to go back to my laptop to work on my original presentation, I get the same message when I try to render, referring to a problem with a Quarto file that isn't even on my laptop!

I am now completely stuck and cannot for the life of me figure out what to do. I restarted RStudio, I restarted both computers, and I still get the same message.

Has anyone else run into this before? Any help greatly, greatly appreciated.

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I solved the problem, but I thought I'd leave the post here in case someone else runs into this.

The solution was to find the hidden .quarto folder inside my project directory and delete everything in the folder. Then I restarted RStudio and everything rendered fine. I repeated this on my laptop and now it's working as usual again too.

So even though the offending .qmd file wasn't present on my laptop, the hidden quarto system files, which must have become corrupted somehow, did sync between the computers, causing the issue to propagate to my laptop.

Glad to be back working again, but that was scary....

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