Link aliases in YAML

[davidkopp]

With the new Obsidian Properties feature it is now quite common to use links to notes in the YAML frontmatter. Also link aliases are supported. The following YAML is valid within Obsidian:

dg-publish: true
links:
  - "[[Link to Note|Link Alias]]"

However, this leads to the following error raised by Eleventy:

Error:

Original error stack trace: YAMLException: unknown escape sequence at line 11, column 71:
[11ty]      ... Link to Note\|Link Alias]]"

[davidkopp]

Related to https://github.com/oleeskild/obsidian-digital-garden/issues/502

[filhit]

As a quick workaround I'm rewriting the frontmatter before build. I put this to .eleventy.js.

eleventyConfig.on('eleventy.before', async ({ dir }) => {
  const files = await fs.promises.readdir(dir.input, {recursive: true});
  const markdownFiles = files.filter((file) => file.endsWith('.md'));
  for (const file of markdownFiles) {
    const content = await fs.promises.readFile(`${dir.input}/${file}`, 'utf-8');
    const frontmatterRegex = /^---([\s\S]*?)---/m;
    const match = content.match(frontmatterRegex);

    if (match) {
      const updatedFrontmatter = match[1].replace(/\\\|/g, '|');
      const updatedContent = content.replace(match[0], `---${updatedFrontmatter}---`);
      await fs.promises.writeFile(`${dir.input}/${file}`, updatedContent, 'utf-8');
    }
  }
});

[filhit]

The other option is to rearrange the compiler steps so that convertFrontMatter is the last step, rather than the first. However, for me, it’s easier to maintain a custom template than a custom Obsidian extension. The proper fix would likely involve adjusting some of the compiler steps that replace links, ensuring they don’t affect links within the frontmatter.

https://github.com/oleeskild/obsidian-digital-garden/blob/6d382830e63e192997efc49564db5ac41046dcca/src/compiler/GardenPageCompiler.ts#L103-L111