❓ Inconsistent due dates: 📅 in task text vs task.due metadata #3415

jankoweb · 2025-04-06T17:56:35Z

jankoweb
Apr 6, 2025

Hi everyone,

I'm running the following DataviewJS code to compare the due date from task metadata (task.due) with the 📅 date written in the task text:

// dataviewjs code block, formatted in js fenced code block for readability

// 📁 Folders to ignore when loading tasks
const ignoredFolders = ["zzz/", "zzz tests/"];

// 📅 Helper function to extract a date from task text using a given regex
function extractDate(taskText, regex) {
  let m = regex.exec(taskText);
  return m ? m[1] : null;
}

// 📄 Load all tasks from files, excluding those in ignored folders
let tasks = dv.pages()
  .where(p =>
    p.file.tasks &&
    p.file.tasks.length > 0 &&
    !ignoredFolders.some(folder => p.file.path.toLowerCase().startsWith(folder.toLowerCase()))
  )
  .flatMap(p => p.file.tasks.map(task => ({ ...task, file: p.file })));

// 🔍 Filter tasks where the due date from metadata differs from the 📅 date in task text
let inconsistentTasks = tasks.filter(task => {
  let dueFromText = extractDate(task.text, /📅\s?(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/);
  let dueFromMeta = task.due ? moment(task.due).format("YYYY-MM-DD") : null;

  return dueFromText && dueFromMeta && dueFromText !== dueFromMeta;
});

/*
🧠 Why differences may occur:

- task.due is set by the parser (e.g. Tasks plugin), which may detect due dates differently
  than what is visually shown via 📅 in the text.
- If multiple dates are present in the task (e.g. ✅, 📅, ➕), the plugin might pick the wrong one.
- The 📅 emoji might just be part of the text and not actually parsed as metadata.
- Some task formats might confuse the parser or be partially supported.
*/

// 🖨 Show all tasks with inconsistent due dates
if (inconsistentTasks.length > 0) {
  dv.paragraph(`❗ Found ${inconsistentTasks.length} tasks with inconsistent 📅 in text vs metadata:\n`);

  dv.list(inconsistentTasks.map(task => {
    let dueFromText = extractDate(task.text, /📅\s?(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/);
    let dueFromMeta = task.due ? moment(task.due).format("YYYY-MM-DD") : "—";
    return `[[${task.file.path}]] – ${task.text}  
📅 from text: **${dueFromText}**, from metadata: **${dueFromMeta}**`;
  }));
} else {
  dv.paragraph("✅ All good – no differences found between 📅 in text and `task.due` metadata.");
}

In my vault, I’m getting quite a few tasks where these two dates differ — meaning the 📅 date visible in the task is not the same as the task.due value returned by Dataview.

Here’s what I’m doing:

I use the internal Obsidian Tasks plugin, including its task edit popup.

I also occasionally use the “postpone” action directly from the task query result.

🧠 Am I doing something wrong here?
🐞 Or is this a known issue or limitation of the way the plugin sets metadata?

Any clarification would be super helpful. Thanks!

Answered by claremacrae

Apr 8, 2025

tl;dr

There are no Variant Selectors in your task markdown in the comment above
Your code is using dataview dates incorrectly
The discussion about pasting text looks like it may have been a red herring.
Between experimenting on this and writing it up, I have spent nearly two hours on this. I don't normally share my donation link when doing Tasks support, and of course it's totally optional, but just in case you were interested, since this is Dataview support....

How to find out what is going on?

Your dueMeta and dueText functions do several things in one line - so we need to work out which aspects of them are the problem.

A general approach here is to make visible the detail of the calc…

View full answer

claremacrae · 2025-04-06T18:02:08Z

claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
Maintainer

Sorry but that is way too long a set of code, written for another plugin, to expect anyone here to be able to debug it.

Suggestions

Check you have not fallen foul of this known issue:
- Data in Task and TasksDate are accidentally mutable - dates can be edited unintentionally #2866
Come up with a shorter reproduction of the problem
Then report back, and including one or two example tasks that demonstrate the problem.
Show us the actual output.

Example reproduction:

Create 1 or 2 tasks that demonstrate the problem
Provide a simple Tasks query that shows the tasks
Provide a simple Dataview query that shows the tasks
Give us:
1. Text all for the above
2. Screenshots for all the above

2 replies

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

Oh, sorry, the crucial part is:

let dueFromText = extractDate(task.text, /📅\s?(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/);
let dueFromMeta = task.due ? moment(task.due).format("YYYY-MM-DD") : null;

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

It can show that task.due differs from the date after 📅.

claremacrae · 2025-04-06T18:03:00Z

claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
Maintainer

(I've got a label for Insufficient Information - currently considering creating one for Too Much Information 😆 )

0 replies

claremacrae · 2025-04-06T18:05:17Z

claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
Maintainer

Actually I have labelled it "Insufficient Information" because it is not clear to me exactly what Tasks behaviour it is talking about...

And I cannot provide support for dataview!

0 replies

claremacrae · 2025-04-06T18:05:49Z

claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
Maintainer

Did you mean to log this in Dataview?

0 replies

claremacrae · 2025-04-06T18:27:39Z

claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
Maintainer

It is certainly expected that Tasks and Dataview would agree in how they parse the date fields.

I don’t know if they would differ in how they treat any time component on the date objects.

0 replies

claremacrae · 2025-04-06T18:28:37Z

claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
Maintainer

In my vault, I’m getting quite a few tasks where these two dates differ — meaning the 📅 date visible in the task is not the same as the task.due value returned by Dataview.

well, why not give some examples here then?

3 replies

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

I'm trying it in an empty Vault, with only the Tasks (default settings) and Dataviewjs (javascript enabled in Settings) plugin:

I have a file with:

- [ ] task 1 📅 2025-04-07 
- [ ] task 2 📅 2025-04-07 
- [ ] task 3 📅 2025-04-08 
- [ ] task 4 📅 2025-04-08

Description	How it was created	Due date shown
task 1	📅 via context menu and date manually edited from keyboard	2025-04-07
task 2	Copied task1 via Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V	2025-04-07
task 3	📅 via context menu	2025-04-08
task 4	Copied task3 via Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V	2025-04-08

And the result:
```dataviewjs
code
```
is:

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

It seems there's a metadata mismatch when I either copy/paste a task from another file or manually edit the date after the 📅 icon. In these cases, task.due doesn’t match the parsed text, as if the metadata isn't updated.

Where is this metadata stored, and is there a way to force it to refresh based on the current file content?

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

I discovered this issue while building a plugin for statistics and visualizing the number of tasks using different filters. The mismatch between task.due and the date parsed directly from the text after the 📅 icon is causing me a lot of trouble.

So my question is: is this a bug, or am I fundamentally doing something wrong?

claremacrae · 2025-04-08T12:39:54Z

claremacrae
Apr 8, 2025
Maintainer

Availability of help

Hi, I am happy to try and help, but just to set expectations, I do not currently have time to go through that quantity of detail above, so I can only give you pointers to things it reminds me of.

What is wrong?

So my question is: is this a bug, or am I fundamentally doing something wrong?

Honestly, maybe it's clear above, but I have not been able to figure out, in a reasonable amount of time, whether you are seeing the unexpected results in any or all of these:

Tasks
Dataview
Some scripting code you wrote yourself

Possible cause: Unicode Variant Selectors

I do know that, through maintaining Tasks, I learned about hidden, invisible characters in Emojis called something like Unicode Variant Selectors, which meant that some extra characters can be next to Emojis, and cause simple regular expressions to not match as expected.

Tasks bug reports:

Tasks PRs:

I don't remember the details, but you may find in those links:

Information about Tools you can use to visualise any Variant Selectors in your own Markdown
Changes to the Regular Expressions that fixed the issue, in the general case, in the Tasks code

If it is a dataview problem

If it is a dataview problem, it would be best to move this discussion to that repo, please.

Do of course add a link here, to the new location of the discussion.

What next

If that doesn't help, please give me:

a short, clear description of the problem
expressed in terms of using the Tasks plugin only
with Markdown that I can copy, to see the behaviour you are talking about

Thanks, and good luck.

2 replies

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

Sorry for overwhelming you:-D

🧪 Reproducing the `task.due` metadata issue

To reproduce the issue, create a markdown file with the following tasks:

Task 1
- Create a task using the 📅 "Set due date" option from the context menu.
- Then, manually edit the date using the keyboard (e.g. change it to 2025-04-07).
Task 2
- Copy Task 1 using Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V.
Task 3
- Create a new task using the 📅 "Set due date" option from the context menu,
  but do not manually edit the date (e.g. leave it as 2025-04-08).
Task 4
- Copy Task 3 using Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V.

This setup allows for comparison between:

tasks with manually edited dates,

tasks with dates untouched after context menu input,

and how copied tasks behave in both scenarios.

Minimalist version of test

Install Dataview plugin
Go to Setting of Dataview and enable:
Copy in the same file:

```dataviewjs
// Format due date from metadata
let dueMeta = t => t.due ? moment(t.due).format("YYYY-MM-DD") : null;

// Extract 📅 date from task text
let dueText = t => (/📅\s?(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/.exec(t.text)?.[1] ?? null);

// Filter tasks with mismatched dates
let mismatches = dv.current().file.tasks.filter(t =>
  dueText(t) && dueMeta(t) && dueText(t) !== dueMeta(t)
);

// Show results
dv.list(mismatches.map(t =>
  `${t.text} 📅 text: ${dueText(t)}, meta: ${dueMeta(t)}`
));
```

Results

This means that when a user manually changes the date in the task text
(which I sometimes do when adjusting multiple tasks quickly without opening each via the edit window),
the Tasks plugin / Obsidian does not update the corresponding metadata.

As a result, there's a mismatch between the visible date in the text
and the date stored in metadata, which is what the Tasks plugin and Dataview rely on.

Note on `task.due` behavior in Dataview / Obsidian Tasks

I don't believe this is a bug in the code or in Dataview itself.
→ The code simply reads the task.due property and compares it to the date in the text.
The issue is not with data reading.
→ Reading works fine – the problem arises after manually editing the date in the text.
What differs:
- The date displayed in the text (after manual change)
- The task.due value stored in metadata
Result:
→ task.due does not reflect the manually changed date, causing a mismatch.
Possible cause:
→ In my opinion, the issue might lie either:
- in the way the Tasks plugin saves and updates metadata, or
- in Obsidian’s core behavior when handling those metadata
Open question:
→ When and how are metadata updated after manually changing a task in the text?
→ This remains unclear and may be the key to understanding the problem.

claremacrae Apr 8, 2025
Maintainer

Sorry for overwhelming you:-D

Thank you - funnily enough, the rest of this reply also overwhelmed me!

Reproducing the issue

🧪 Reproducing the task.due metadata issue

To reproduce the issue, create a markdown file with the following tasks:

Task 1

Create a task using the 📅 "Set due date" option from the context menu.

Then, manually edit the date using the keyboard (e.g. change it to 2025-04-07).

Task 2

Copy Task 1 using Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V.

Task 3

Create a new task using the 📅 "Set due date" option from the context menu,
but do not manually edit the date (e.g. leave it as 2025-04-08).

Task 4

Copy Task 3 using Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V.

When I said with Markdown that I can copy, to see the behaviour you are talking about I really did mean it. 😄

As well as the above being time-consuming and error-prone to follow a list of steps, there could be any number of platform-specific things going on with the copy-and-paste.

It doesn't matter how you created the Markdown, it matters what the Markdown content is.

Likely cause of your problem

I am 99% confident that the following regex is your problem.

// Extract 📅 date from task text
let dueText = t => (/📅\s?(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/.exec(t.text)?.[1] ?? null);

Specifically, you have not updated that regular expression to handle the variant selectors I mentioned in my previous message.

By reviewing the diffs in the following PR (linked to in my previous message), you can see how to adjust your own regex so it works with emojis that have Variant Selector 16 (which seems to be the common case):

https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks/pull/2695/files

claremacrae · 2025-04-08T19:06:48Z

claremacrae
Apr 8, 2025
Maintainer

tl;dr

There are no Variant Selectors in your task markdown in the comment above
Your code is using dataview dates incorrectly
The discussion about pasting text looks like it may have been a red herring.
Between experimenting on this and writing it up, I have spent nearly two hours on this. I don't normally share my donation link when doing Tasks support, and of course it's totally optional, but just in case you were interested, since this is Dataview support....

How to find out what is going on?

Your dueMeta and dueText functions do several things in one line - so we need to work out which aspects of them are the problem.

A general approach here is to make visible the detail of the calculations.

I created the following file:

- [ ] task 1 📅 2025-04-07 
- [ ] task 2 📅 2025-04-07 
- [ ] task 3 📅 2025-04-08 
- [ ] task 4 📅 2025-04-08 

## Fixed code

```dataviewjs
// Format due date from metadata
let dueMeta = t => t.due ? moment(t.due).format("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss") : null;

// Extract 📅 date from task text
let dueText = t => (/📅\uFE0F?\s?(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/.exec(t.text)?.[1] ?? null);

function format(label, value) {
    return `<tt>${label}='${value}'; </tt>`;
}

// Show data for all tasks in this file
dv.list(dv.current().file.tasks.map(t =>
    format('t.text'       , t.text) + 
    format('t.due'        , t.due) +
    format('moment(t.due)', moment(t.due)) +
    format('dueText(t)'   , dueText(t)) +
    format('dueMeta(t)'   , dueMeta(t))
));
```

Things to note:

Note how it displays the results of the parts of the calculation in dueMeta().
And it shows all tasks, removing the need to reason about the discrepancy calculation.

So what is going on?

Here is what the output looks like:

This shows that:

Dataview's t.due does contain the correct date
moment(t.due) is clearly where the problem occurs

It looks like you should be using Dataview's dateformat() function instead:
https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/reference/functions/#dateformatdatedatetime-string

2 replies

claremacrae Apr 10, 2025
Maintainer

@jankoweb Just checking that you have seen the above….

jankoweb Apr 10, 2025
Author

Many thanks! 🙏

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❓ Inconsistent due dates: 📅 in task text vs task.due metadata #3415

jankoweb Apr 6, 2025

tl;dr

How to find out what is going on?

Replies: 8 comments · 9 replies

claremacrae Apr 6, 2025 Maintainer

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025 Author

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025 Author

claremacrae Apr 6, 2025 Maintainer

claremacrae Apr 6, 2025 Maintainer

claremacrae Apr 6, 2025 Maintainer

claremacrae Apr 6, 2025 Maintainer

claremacrae Apr 6, 2025 Maintainer

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025 Author

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025 Author

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025 Author

claremacrae Apr 8, 2025 Maintainer

Availability of help

What is wrong?

Possible cause: Unicode Variant Selectors

If it is a dataview problem

What next

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025 Author

🧪 Reproducing the task.due metadata issue

Minimalist version of test

Results

Note on task.due behavior in Dataview / Obsidian Tasks

claremacrae Apr 8, 2025 Maintainer

Reproducing the issue

🧪 Reproducing the task.due metadata issue

Likely cause of your problem

claremacrae Apr 8, 2025 Maintainer

tl;dr

How to find out what is going on?

So what is going on?

claremacrae Apr 10, 2025 Maintainer

jankoweb Apr 10, 2025 Author

jankoweb
Apr 6, 2025

Replies: 8 comments 9 replies

claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
Maintainer

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
Maintainer

claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
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claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
Maintainer

claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
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claremacrae
Apr 6, 2025
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jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

claremacrae
Apr 8, 2025
Maintainer

jankoweb Apr 8, 2025
Author

🧪 Reproducing the `task.due` metadata issue

Note on `task.due` behavior in Dataview / Obsidian Tasks

claremacrae Apr 8, 2025
Maintainer

🧪 Reproducing the `task.due` metadata issue

claremacrae
Apr 8, 2025
Maintainer

claremacrae Apr 10, 2025
Maintainer

jankoweb Apr 10, 2025
Author