Enhancement: Support comma separated arrays in front matter

[iranzo]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When using Pelican markdown files with frontmatter I get several issues:

• Tags are added a quote all together, I guess because it expects array type with quoted items, which is not the case with Pelican
• date and modified are quoted... again, not what Pelican expects, causing failures on rendering

Describe the solution you'd like

Allow configurable 'frontmatter' styling for 'hugo', 'pelican' or others

Describe alternatives you've considered
So far, disabling and uninstalling the extension as it was breaking the articles I've. I've tried setting date format in settings and not add quotes, but still it adds them.

[iranzo]

BTW I've found the "frontMatter.taxonomy.noPropertyValueQuotes": ["modified", "date", "tags"], but I think that a dropdown to select compatibility will make it easier ;-)

[estruyf]

Thank @iranzo for reporting this. The frontMatter.taxonomy.noPropertyValueQuotes setting is exactly meant for this. As some need quotes, and others don't.

Having an optimized settings experience is on backlog #80. The dropdown would be a nice addition to it.

I did some tests, and in the projects, I use for testing it is working as expected, but it might be because of all use YAML.

What is Pelican using? Would you be able to share a sample page with the front matter and content?

[iranzo]

Pelican is also using YAML, for example: https://github.com/iranzo/iranzo.github.io/blob/master/content/2021-09-11-rhel8-administration.en.md

[iranzo]

I think that there are other things involved in the way Frontmatter processes the files:

Even if the quotes are not enabled to be used, seems that it tries to read those as 'hugo'-style keys/values

[estruyf]

Hugo doesn't use a style, they use YAML format, like other site generators. It is gray-matter which does the parsing.

I'll validate it against your blog content, thanks for the reference.

[iranzo]

Sorry, for 'style' I meant for arrays, pelican uses comma separated words, but seems that it expects a [ and ] for specifying more than one tag

[estruyf]

There are two issues:

1. The title contains [] - so the YAML parser thinks you're adding an array
2. Arrays in YAML can be [] or like:

tags:
  - tag 1
  - tag 2

[iranzo]

Yes, and 'neither' example 1, or example 2 are taken by pelican (I guess it should), but only parses keywords as comma-separated words

[estruyf]

The title will need to be manually escaped. I will add a title input on the panel as well soon so that it will automatically escape it for you.

[estruyf]

I got good news, I changed some internal logic and the new version will be able to work with comma-separated array values.

In order to support this, you'll have to do the following in your settings.json:

{
  "frontMatter.taxonomy.commaSeparatedFields": [
    "tags"
  ],
  "frontMatter.taxonomy.noPropertyValueQuotes": [
    "tags"
  ],
  "frontMatter.taxonomy.tags": [
    "Packt Publishing",
    "RHCSA",
    "RHEL",
    "book",
    "system administration",
    "foss"
  ]
}

As the comma-separated arrays are not valid YAML, you will have to let Front Matter know how to parse it. That is why the new frontMatter.taxonomy.commaSeparatedFields is introduced.

If you want to test it out, you can install the beta version of Front Matter: https://beta.frontmatter.codes - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=eliostruyf.vscode-front-matter-beta

Be sure to uninstall the main version, as the two cannot run or be installed at the same time.

[iranzo]

Great, it seems to work fine with the tags, looking forward for the autoescape too!

Thanks a lot!