Obsidian: Front Matter Template does not publish "double quotes" to Obsidian YAML

[MasssiveJuice08]

Issue

"Double quotation" speech marks entered into the Omnivore plugin's custom frontmatter do not get entered into Obsidian YAML frontmatter.

I have my custom frontmatter template I have the following three lines:

dg-metatags:
 description: "{{{description}}}"
 "og:image": "https://i.imgur.com/LmCg5HX.png"

Expected behaviour:

1. the contents of "{{{description}}}" should be published in the YAML as being surrounded by "double quotations".
2. "og:image": "https://i.imgur.com/LmCg5HX.png" should be published in the YAML as-is.

Actual behaviour:

1. Article {{{description}}} is rendered without double quotations in YAML
2. "og:image": "https://i.imgur.com/LmCg5HX.png" is published as og:image: https://i.imgur.com/LmCg5HX.png without double quotations in YAML

Example

For an article whose {{{description}}} is "A Short History of Morrowind" the frontmatter is published in Obsidian by Omnivore like so:

dg-metatags:
 description: A Short History of Morrowind
 og:image: https://i.imgur.com/LmCg5HX.png

Expected behaviour:

dg-metatags:
 description: "A Short History of Morrowind"
 "og:image": "https://i.imgur.com/LmCg5HX.png"

---

Frontmatter template in Obsidian:

---

Obsidian YAML frontmatter of an article without double quotations

---

My full custom frontmatter template looks like this:

id: {{{id}}}
title: >
  {{{title}}}
{{#author}}
author: >
  {{{author}}}
{{/author}}
{{#labels.length}}
tags:
{{#labels}} - {{{name}}}
{{/labels}}
{{/labels.length}}
date_saved: {{{dateSaved}}}
{{#datePublished}}
date_published: {{{datePublished}}}
{{/datePublished}}
site_name: {{siteName}}
original_url: {{{omnivoreUrl}}}
dg-publish: true
dg-metatags:
 description: "{{{description}}}"
 "og:image": "https://i.imgur.com/LmCg5HX.png"

[jacksonh]

I don't think that will work because what if the description has quotes in it?

[MasssiveJuice08]

Fair point, although article descriptions can be manually changed in Omnivore, so as long as I change these to be YAML compliant then that shouldn't be an issue.

---

Would this be the reason why the quotation marks aren't being used? In data.json they are being escaped as special characters \"

[jacksonh]

I don't think thats the issue, i suspect its because we validate in a YAML library and then spit out the validated YAML. But let me verify that with @sywhb

One question: why do you need the quotes? Without white space isn't og:image evaluated to the same thing in YAML as "og:image" or are they treated as different properties?

[MasssiveJuice08]

One question: why do you need the quotes? Without white space isn't og:image evaluated to the same thing in YAML as "og:image" or are they treated as different properties?

I think I might not actually need the double quotations. I'm publishing my vault online using Obsidian-Digital-Garden, and I'm just following the docs here on setting metatags for a page, and the example screenshot shows the aforementioned YAML lines as being surrounded by double quotes. However, I tested on Omnivore article pages which have been published on my site and the metatags all render just fine. The page I actually used as an example in my first post even works – History of Morrowind - The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP).

So for my specific use case, this issue is resolved. It might be useful to keep open though for any other possible use-cases where you'd want the Omnivore frontmatter template to publish double quotations.

[sywhb]

"og:image"

Yeah, that's right. We use the library provided by Obsidian to parse YAML file first to validate it and it will remove the outer quotation marks unless the value is a multiline string or some other cases