{{title}} does not work in setting "Note creation file path" when special characters are in the title #99

Activity

1. NewAiCoder commented on Jul 10, 2024

   

   NewAiCoder

   on Jul 10, 2024

   More actions

   Having the same issue, even though the documentation indicates that {{title}} used in the file path section should automatically remove all special characters:
   https://podnotes.obsidian.guide/templates/
2. Przeswit commented on Jul 27, 2024

   

   Przeswit

   on Jul 27, 2024

   More actions

   I'm bumping this topic - my situation looks very similar. According to the documentation, special characters in the podcast title should be automatically removed - but they aren't. As a result, whenever an episode title contains, for example, a question mark, the "create note" function only generates a message saying "Failed to create note: ..."
3. chhoumann commented on Jun 14, 2026

   

   chhoumann

   on Jun 14, 2026

   Owner

   More actions

   Thanks for the reports, and apologies for the long delay here.

   This is fixed as of v2.13.4 (current release is 2.16.0). If you're on 2.13.4 or newer, {{title}} in the Note creation file path setting now strips all filesystem-illegal characters and your example episode creates a note successfully.

   Root cause

   At the time this was filed (June 2024), {{title}} in the file-path setting was already being sanitized, but the illegal-character regex did not include ?. The reported episode title —

   Spezial: Wie kommt Deutschland aus der Krise? (Rüdiger Bachmann, Ökonom)

   — had its : and , stripped, but the ? survived. A ? is illegal in filenames on Windows and Android, so app.vault.create rejected it and you got "Failed to create note". That's also why the behavior didn't match the docs, which said special characters are removed.

   The fix

   Commit 371184f ("fix: replace '?' in file names with empty string", 2025-01-19) added ? to the sanitizer regex (src/TemplateEngine.ts, replaceIllegalFileNameCharactersInString). It now removes all nine OS/Obsidian-illegal filename characters: * " \ / < > : | ?.

   Verification

   Running the exact title from this issue through the current sanitizer and app.vault.create in a real Obsidian vault produces:

   Spezial Wie kommt Deutschland aus der Krise (Rüdiger Bachmann Ökonom).md
   

   …and the note is created without error. (umlauts and parentheses are legal in filenames, so they're preserved.)

   Note on related edge cases (not this bug)

   A couple of separate situations can still cause a create failure, but they are not the special-character problem reported here:

   • Very long titles (e.g. ~300 chars) can hit the OS path-length limit (ENAMETOOLONG). That's tracked in [BUG] Handling of max path length when creating notes #22.
   • A title made up entirely of illegal characters would sanitize to an empty name. That's a latent edge case, distinct from this report.

   Closing as fixed — please reopen (or open a fresh issue) if you still see this on v2.13.4+ and include the episode title and your file-path setting. 🙏
4. chhoumann

   closed this as completedon Jun 14, 2026
5. chhoumann

   added 2 commits that reference this issue on Jun 16, 2026

   fix(notes): cap note path length and harden folder creation (#22, #87)

   ...

   3e688d0

   fix(notes): cap note path length and harden folder creation (#22, #87) (

   ...

   858e280