Solved: A problem with newlines in variable values on macOS

[Taitava]

@gapmiss reported the following bug here: #1 (comment)

# New Note from Clipboard
# prompt modal for note title
echo {{clipboard}} >> {{!_noteTitle}}.md
open "obsidian://advanced-uri?vault=CiO&filepath={{!_noteTitle}}"

Only issue found:

line-breaks(\n) do NOT get converted to actual line-breaks in the markdown

In the "New Note from Clipboard" command, with the Clipboard:

Shell Commands v0.14.0
Obsidian v0.15.9 (installer version: v0.15.9)
macOS Monterey 12.4 (21F79)

resulting markdown:

Shell Commands v0.14.0\nObsidian v0.15.9 (installer version: v0.15.9)\nmacOS Monterey 12.4 (21F79)\n

[Taitava]

@gapmiss May I ask what shell are you using: Bash, Dash or Zsh? Here's how to find it out if you are not sure. Thanks! 🙂

---

And just out of curiosity, in >> {{!_noteTitle}}.md you are using the exclamation mark ! to prevent escaping the variable value, may I ask why? 🙂 I'm interested to learn about situations where people end up using the exclamation mark so that I can better understand what kind of problems people may face with the escaping. I know this {{!_noteTitle}} part does not relate to the actual newline problem, so my question is a bit offtopic. 🙂

[gapmiss]

I am using bash.

The _noteTitle is the results of a "Preaction" prompt. So, being confident that there is not line breaks or dangerous characters in the note title I assign, I skip the escaping. I hope that makes sense.

[Taitava]

I ran into this too, on Linux

Sorry @gapmiss , I forgot this bug completely until encountering it myself.

Just some quick thoughts: At this point I think it might be related to \n being escaped as \\n. But I'm not certain if that's the cause of this bug, and don't have time to check it right now.

Some images just for myself when I start digging into this:

• image1
• image2

[Taitava]

Possible solution?

@gapmiss can you plese try this:

Add argument -e to the echo command:

# New Note from Clipboard
# prompt modal for note title
echo -e {{clipboard}} >> {{!_noteTitle}}.md
open "obsidian://advanced-uri?vault=CiO&filepath={{!_noteTitle}}"

-e should make echo interpret \n as a real newline character. I had completely forgotten about this behavior of echo. I found an old issue where I had noticed that -e is needed: #109.

If this works for you, I guess there's nothing to "fix" in SC. 👍

[gapmiss]

Yes! The -e flag solves the issue. Appreciate your due diligence.

[Taitava]

Thank you! 🙂 Just too bad it took me a few months to solve as I didn't remember the -e option on July. 😓