I’m surprised I didn’t find a pre-existing FR for this, but can we support decimals and periods in tags?
Use case or problem
Especially in software development, there is a lot of good use for allowing decimals in tag names, such as version control tags. An example use case would be to have a way to embed Github semver tags/releases into my notes.
Proposed solution
Add the “.” to the list of supported characters for tags
Current workaround (optional)
Concatenate semvers into an ugly string without decimals: #v001a
The tag format is intended to be widely compatible with other hashtag implementations, which typically don’t support periods. (But as long as the feature request is open, there’s always a little hope.)
Please kindly consider my suggestion and optimize the product design:
Allow the use of “.” in tags, such as centos7.9.
This kind of tag is a common operation in the blog I built using hexo before(see figure below), but it cannot be used normally in Obsidian. I think this is a defect in product design, and I hope you can adopt my suggestions and solve this problem, and together make Obsidian better!
Allowing periods in tags can easily lead to many problems and conflicts including with other plugins, it’s harder to parse correctly and style appropriately, so instead you have to resort to other means of achieving the same outcome as seen below:
A dot or period is allowed in many other applications to define a tag name. (Dendron and LogSeq accept them without any problem).
A tag should not accept spaces, so it can cleanly be defined as a word that starts with a hash tag and ends with a space, and pretty much accepts any character between the hash tag and the space.
An option could be added to allow users to use a dot in tag name if required for backwards compatibility and plugin developers.
#src/doi/10.1109/WAINA.2018.00087 for example for notes based on the article with that DOI
I am following a pattern to tag the note explaining about the resource as #src/doi/10.1109/WAINA.2018.00087/meta for example if needed then using the tag panel to filter everything that mentions that, or one level up to get all notes which mention a DOI paper. Same for books with ISBN and even uni classes with year_semester/class and if I need to change the structure I can quickly use Tag Wrangler for that. Kinda OP tbh, even more if you use it to reference time.
Proposed solution
Allow “.” to be used in tags
Like #src/doi/10.1109/WAINA.2018.00087 rn is recognized as #src/doi/10 and the rest as text, but it should be fully recognized.
Current workaround (optional)
Only thing that I can think now is replacing the dot with something else and when recovering replacing back
Would really like Obsidian to accept a dot in a tag name. It should accept both the dot and the forward slash exactly as Lucas explained. (i.e. dots and slashes can be used together to define a tag name)
Hello, I’m fairly fresh to Obsidian, 2 months now installed. Didn’t know exactly how powerful Obsidian was, just downloaded a few notepad alternatives… and now I’m hooked!
Forgive me, but here’s an over explanation of why I plus+1 this:
I know it sounds like a nuance, or minor deal to most maybe however, I agree. Please support “.” in tags. For instance, I want to use “G.Skill” as a tag and want it written exactly like that because that’s how the company spells their name. When forced to change the way things are written causes an inconvenience, pauses your flow to come up with the most ideal alternative (possibly have to change it everywhere else for one situation… unnecessary extra decisions must be made), and confusion for future reference whether it be Obsidian or another program, another reader/ writer. Sure “GSkill” sounds simple enough, and yea, that’s what I would type to find the tag if it were spelt “G.Skill”, but this exact ability is the great feature at play. I don’t have to type character for character to find the correct term’s spelling, I’ll see the correct term in the end regardless, which keeps the momentum going and is great for several reasons I don’t need to explain. Consistency and precision is key to my work and the freedom and unmatched level of control in Obsidian to customize perfectly to what suits your style in any given or commandeered situation is what makes the program so powerful and why I’ve become hooked! jpfivex
+1
@WetHat Good, although I don’t think I understand the difference: unicode characters are supposed to be an extension of ascii. If I have to use other characters, how do I find them?
There are Unicode characters outside the ASCII range which look similar to ASCII characters but have a different code. The easiest way to find Unicode substitutes is via a ChatGPT or Copilot conversation.
Here is an example of a Copilot conversation to find a substitute for the ASCII ‘&’ character:
Copilot Prompt
Find Unicode characters which look like ‘&’
Copilot Answer:
Sure! Here are some Unicode characters that resemble the ampersand (&):
U+214B: ⅋ (Turned Ampersand)
U+1F670: 🙰 (Script Ligature Et Ornament)
U+0026: & (Ampersand)
U+FE60: ﹠ (Small Ampersand)
U+FF06: ＆ (Fullwidth Ampersand)
These characters might look similar to & but have different uses and meanings. If you need > > more look-alikes or specific characters, you can explore the Unicode Character Table for a > comprehensive list.
Notes:
“U+0026: & (Ampersand)” is the ASCII ampersand. For use in tags you need to pick “U+FF06: ＆ (Fullwidth Ampersand)”.
Not all ASCII characters have a good substitute in the Unicode range. Some experimentation is required.
We don’t support special characters because most of them would interfere with other syntax used by obsidian or simply make it difficult to have tag at the end of sentence #tag.
Just an update on a possible solution. We converted all our tags to note wikilinks. i.e. if we previously had a tag like #continuous_improvement we have changed it to [[tag.continuous.improvement]]
We also use the community plugin “Auto Note mover” to automatically move any notes that start with “tag.” to their own “Tags” folder.
The only downside we have found so far is that page links don’t show up in the tags property frontmatter (even though the source code shows that the page link is indeed there) (i.e. Obsidian is not rendering the text.)
I’m going to look for an “expansion” solution that will automatically convert “#xyz” to “[[tag.xyz]]” as a shortcut for when I am typing text.
Hi there, new user to Obsidian (moving from Evernote) and I really would like this feature or a workaround. I like @bvautier’s solution above but would really prefer one that doesn’t require me to remember to type “#tag-” as a prefix to all my tags. Especially since I’m trying to import about 35k notes into Obsidian…although I am going to try their solution.
My use case is that I have specific prefixes for tags (and files actually) that help sort my tags into specific contexts. Examples:
+= People / animals (+john-smith, +fluffy, +client-name)
_ = Project (_world-peace, _financial-independence) - the bulk of my tags are project tags
¯ (macron or overscore) = archived project ( ¯_start-my-business)
While I completely understand the need to make these tags compatible across multiple filesystems / storage solutions / plugins, I’m also under the impression that Obsidian is able to be customized to pretty much whatever I want it to be. Since tags are seemingly just metadata and not part of the filename, it’s surprising this isn’t able to be accomplished with a plugin at the very least.
Does anyone have any other suggestions, or do I need to start learning how to write plugins? I just want to get out of Evernote and not have to overhaul my entire system - which I also use without issue with my task manager. So much change for a feature I didn’t think was unique to Evernote. Please save me from Evernote!
I wish the Obsidian Importer was a little more customizable. I’m going to try the YARLE Importer instead and see if I can minimize the manual work once things are imported into Obsidian from Evernote - then maybe I can program some front matter similar to this.
