Do not show checkbox if there is no text after it / only whitespace.

[JoinGitHub1]

I have a Daily note template which includes - [ ] as placeholder and for quick adding new tasks. If I have no tasks this day, a checkbox with no text to it will appear in the tasks lists in the next daily note. I am hoping to hide these checkboxes which is "empty".

Hide this (with trailing space)
- [ ]

[claremacrae]

Interesting. @JoinGitHub1 What does the dataview plugin do? Does it include the empty task in its list of tasks?

[claremacrae]

Here is how GitHub renders a task with a trailing space:

• [ ]

Rendered like this, as of 2022-06-12, that is, displayed, but not drawn as a task:

And one without a trailing space:

• [ ]

Rendered like this, as of 2022-06-12, that is, displayed, but not drawn as a task:

This does suggest to me that the way the Tasks plugin recognises tasks could be adjusted to require at least one non-space character in the description.

I'd still like to know what dataview does in this situation though.

[JoinGitHub1]

Thanks for being interested in my post. Dataview behaves the same way. Please see bottom of screenshots.

[claremacrae]

Thank you very much for checking that.

I do agree with your question, but as the behaviour is currently the same as dataview, I'm unlikely to be able to make this a priority for some time unfortunately.

A pull request would be welcome though.

[aubreyz]

I don't know about this use case, but it WOULD be very useful to be able to switch off the checkboxes in query results for lots of other reasons

[aubreyz]

It would be useful to be able to switch off checkboxes in query results for many other reasons, not task specific, but for all output.

[claremacrae]

Thank you for the suggestion.

That’s a different topic than this one, so would need to be in an Idea of its own. .

Feel free to search through the existing Idea Discussions and if there is one for this already, upvote it. And if not, to submit a new one. Do include some example reasons too.

Thanks!

[JoinGitHub1]

Do you think I it would help to ask the same question in Dataview forum – or maybe even Obsidian developers?

[claremacrae]

Do you think I it would help to ask the same question in Dataview forum – or maybe even Obsidian developers?

Hi @JoinGitHub1 I don't mind - I don't really have any view on that.

Tasks gets all the list items from Obsidian, and then matches each against this regex, to detect tasks:

obsidian-tasks/src/Task.ts

Lines 73 to 77 in 4f23eaf

	// Main regex for parsing a line. It matches the following:
	// - Indentation
	// - Status character
	// - Rest of task after checkbox markdown
	public static readonly taskRegex = /^([\s\t]*)[-*] +\[(.)\] *(.*)/u;

Because Obsidian says that - [ ] is a list item, it is considered by Tasks and checked against that Regex.

I doubt the Obsidian team would change what they treated as a list because of this request. That seems wrong, as these lines really are list items.

If anyone cared about this enough, they would be welcome to add unit tests for the code that uses the above regex, and consider adjusting it to not pick up the case where the description is only spaces.