Converting set of names into internal links

[mikedoel]

What I’m trying to do

I frequently capture meeting minutes into a note and end up with a line like:

Attendees: Jim Smith, Sally Brown, Helen Jones, Marco Anderson

where I’d like to efficiently convert the attendees into internal links like:

Attendees: [[Jim Smith]], [[Sally Brown]], [[Helen Jones]], [[Marco Anderson]]

I’m new to Obsidian and know I can select each name and double tap the [ to do an individual name, but I’d love a way to quickly select all attendees and convert them all.

I’ve looked for a community plugin and at the doc for internal-links, but nothing seems like it shows how to do this. Any suggestions?

[ScottKillen]

If you enable the Backlinks core plugin, you can visit the target (e.g. Jim Smith) and then look at the Backlinks tab. Scroll down to “Unlinked Mentions” and you can quickly click the “Link” button for each unlinked mention.

This doesn’t do exactly what you requested–but depending on the size, you can also open your vault in VS Code and perform a “Find & Replace in files” replacing “John Smith” with “[[John Smith]]” all at once.

[Dor]

Or write the names vertically instead of in a line
Press Alt/Option while selecting them all.
Move the cursors to the beginning of the line, press [[ then move cursors to the end of the line and press ]].
(I use keyboard for this last step).

[I-d-as]

@mikedoel You already have good options here. But just in case, I figured I’d add that if you list the names vertically, you could use a method similar to what I described here Prefix plugin - #3 by I-d-as. In order to add the ]] at the end of each name you could use VSCode to search with regex enabled for \n- \[x\] replacing it with ]] followed by an actual new line and - [x] . This can be accomplished by typing ]] then an new line and typing - [x] then selecting, copying and pasting the text into the replace field. After running that, you can simply use the method described in link to replace - [x] with either [[ or - [[ depending on whether you want the name links in a bullet list or not.

This technique is helpful in cases where the list is very long and using the multiple cursor method described by @Dor is perhaps taking too long. But, honestly, that would have to be a pretty big meeting to warrant this. Regardless, this can be helpful in other scenarios. Good luck.

Thanks.