Noodlesoft Forums

I have notes in markdown that I want to move to a subfolder based on the first (or only) hashtag that they contain.

For example, this is the top of a certain note:

author:: Trev de Vroome
source:: [Book Summary: Accelerate](https://tdevroome.medium.com/book-summa ... 31efe4c34c)
clipped:: [[2022-05-23]]
published:: 2019-10-18

#resources/agile

# Book Summary: Accelerate


Accelerate, by Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim

I have created a rule that should match the tag and move it accordingly, using a custom attribute. It more-or-less works, but Hazel seems to either be too eager in matching or not match spaces/newlines at all, as it is matching the custom attribute as "agileBook" (ie. the last part of the tag that I want to match, but also the first word on the next line)

Here you can see the rule and what it matches:


A closer look at the "resource" custom attribute, which contains only characters. According to the hover text, it should only match non-blank characters:


And this is a closer look at the content Hazel seems to read:


Am I missing something here? Is Hazel not reading my file correctly, is there something wrong with my matching pattern, or is Hazel just too hungry in matching?
I've tried adding a space at the end of my matching pattern, but that doesn't seem to have any effect

The images aren't coming through but note that if you enter a space, it will match any amount of whitespace, including newlines. Every other match token will not cross newline boundaries.

I've updated the images, sorry about that.
As I mentioned, I tried both with and without a space after the matching pattern, but there seems to be no difference at all

# is a formatting character for a header in markdown. I think you need a space after it for it to be interpreted that way, which is why the first # is in the text content comes through, but not the second. Try removing the space between "#" and "Book" in your file.

A space between a # and the rest of the sentence indeed specifies a header (an h1 to be exact, as ## or ### or even #### can also be used for h2, h3, and h4 respectively) in markdown, and that line is a header.

I'm confused why that # in the header doesn't seem to show up in the preview (see the last screenshot). It seems to be completely gone somehow, which is why I think the match pattern seems to be too hungry, while it might actually be an issue with the input? Does Hazel do anything special to run the match pattern on a file?

To confirm my suspicion, I copied the markdown file and changed it into a regular .txt file. It has the exact same contents though.

Imagine my surprise when running the preview on this file, and Hazel was able to accurately detect the tag

The text contents for Markdown are the actual text, not any formatting. It's like with HTML. You don't see all the various markup tags.