How to add date from note title to YAML alias tag and format it differently

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1

Hi,
This is my first post here, so BIG Hello to everyone! :slight_smile:

I try to explain my problem.
From many years I’m creating a daily note for each day. This is my journal I called “logbook”. For years I done it in Scrivener and each day had a title like (DD/MM/YYYY - “day_of_the_week”). Recently I moved all my daily notes to Obsidian and changed notes titles (filenames) to DD-MM-YYYY - “day_of_the_week”.md format to not messing around with “/”. But, inside these notes I also have some dates written in my old format. I don’t want to change this for now, but I want to use Obsidian linking ability to link these old dates to real notes in new format.
Example:
File: “24-02-2015 - Thuesday.md” contains inside some reference to other day, for example “04/03/2014”. And I want this “31/10/2011” in this file to be a link to note “31-10-2011 - Monday.md”.
My main idea is to put YAML “alias” tag inside “31-10-2011 - Monday.md” file. which can be backlinked to the notes that mentioned this day. But because of some history how I named my notes in previous tool I used (Scrivener) all dates inside notes are having “/” instead of “-” so I thought that if I push somehow alias with properly formatted date taken from the file name it may work.

I think I have 2 issues here:

  1. I have a template that is used by “Daily notes” plugin. Plugin is formatted in that way:
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    Each note is put into a year folder/month folder/note.md
    In my template I want to add this YAML section that would automatically add date into “alias” tag in this different format: DD/MM/YYYY so for example I want this YAML to looks like this (in new note)

alias: 05/07/2023

This must be taken from the file name as sometimes I’m creating a note for previous date (using Calendar plugin), so the alias must represent date of the note not the note creation date.

  1. How can I add this YAML section to rest of my notes easly and automaticaly make alias with proper date taken from file name?

I’m not very experienced in Obsidian. I tried Templater but looks like I don’t understand it, or I just don’t know how I can achieve that in it. Is it even possible to do this somehow?

Bonus question:
And later is there a way to check all this “Unlinked mentions” and make them a real links?

Best regards
Heniekk

2

Aliases are defined in a note to make future references to a note using those aliases. This means that you should create your new notes using either the core template plugin or the Templater plugin, and insert aliases to allow for linking using the old format into the yaml.

For old notes, you either need to retype the link using the auto-complete to find an already defined alias, or you could write a Templater template which picks up on your selected texts, converts the date, and then looks for a note with that date and creates a suitable link.

After the creation of this template you should be able to select an old style date, and then trigger the template to insert a link to that note instead of the selection.

A final note on date formats, and that is that neither of your formats matches the common ISO8601 format of YYYY-MM-DD, which is recommended and recognised by many plugins, like dataview. So when doing this work I would strongly consider adding date: YYYY-MM-DD into your YAML as well as the other aliases.