Filter for exact tag match like "tag is <tag>"

[punxsutawney]

Hi. I use some very short tags for implementing some prioritization processes like #A and #B and in other cases subtags under a main tag like #book/science #book/literature, but also tags than just contain #book tag.

But if I want to filter tasks that contains exactly #A or just #book and use "tag contains #book" it shows me not only those tags that contains #book but also all the sub-tags, in the case of #A it shows me all where the letter A is part of the tag.

How could I filter for exact tag match? could something like "tag is #book" be implemented ? Perhaps I'm missing something? Thanks!.

[claremacrae]

Hi,

Now

Depending on how many other similar tags you have, you could now use multiple queries - like:

```tasks
tag includes #book
tag does not include #book/literature
tag does not include #book/fanfiction
```

Or you could combine them with boolean operators in to one line with:

(tag includes #book) AND NOT (tag includes #book/literature) AND NOT (tag includes #book/fanfiction)

Or as a short-cut:

tag includes #book
tag does not include book/

I don't have a good answer for the #A case.

In Future

It's worth your subscribing to #790 - regular expression search - as once that is released, you would be able to search for exact strings something like:

tag regex matches /^#a$/i

Which is:

tag:

• starts with a # - ^#
• contains an a
• then the end of the text $
• and is case-insensitive (the i at the end)

[punxsutawney]

Thank you @claremacrae, I'll wait for the regular expression search then, it seems to solve the use cases.

[claremacrae]

@punxsutawney Tasks 1.12.0 is out now, with regex search of several fields, including description but not yet tags.

There are fairly thorough docs.

It is now possible to do exact searches of short tags. Although doing this via description is a little ugly, it does work.

See the Finding short tags example.

[punxsutawney]

Thank you @claremacrae!, I will try to refactor my current solution using this aproach.

[claremacrae]

Thanks. If it works, could you update the marked answer please?

[claremacrae]

Regular expression searching in tags is just released - in 1.13.0.

tag regex matches /#a$/ matches exactly #a
tag regex matches /#a$/i matches exactly #a and #A

Docs: https://obsidian-tasks-group.github.io/obsidian-tasks/queries/filters/#tags

The examples in that page, and in https://obsidian-tasks-group.github.io/obsidian-tasks/queries/regular-expressions/#finding-sub-tags are based on the questions in this discussion.

[claremacrae]

Closing as feature has been released