Preventing user confusion concerning quotes

[dalewking]

So I was starting to write a bug report about heading does not include not working but I figured out what my issue was, but I think others might run into this confusion as well. I wanted to exclude entries for Day Planner plugin which I was putting under a heading ## Day Planner on my daily entry.

What I tried to exclude them was adding this to my tasks query:

heading does not include "Day Planner"

Coming from other query languages (e.g SQL) that seemed the natural way to write that query, but that filter did not work. The documentation says that the end of that query is a <string> which many might interpret as a quoted string. The issue of course is that you do not apply any significance to quotes there, so it was literally looking for a header that contained Day Planner in quotes.

Not sure what the best answer is, but I can tell you that it cost me some time trying to figure out why my filter was not working and that means it will probably affect others as well, so it would be nice to prevent such confusion. The question is what could be done to prevent others from running into this confusion.

Perhaps you add handling to actually handle the quotes as expected. Perhaps it needs to be noted more clearly in the documentation. Perhaps you detect the quoted string and somehow warn them that this is a problem, particularly if you find no such headings (although this would affect other queries than just heading).

[claremacrae]

Hello @dalewking, thank you for the clear explanation.

I've seen at least one other person fall in to this pit, in the last few months.

Perhaps it needs to be noted more clearly in the documentation.

Yes, I'll do the above.

[claremacrae]

Perhaps it needs to be noted more clearly in the documentation.

Yes, I'll do the above.

Documentation added in #1338

It will be published to the documentation site in the next release.