Set .Page.Params from filename

support
1

Hi!

Si I’m trying to do exactly the same thing as @tania namely setting some param (like date, weight and title) from the filename, so that I can for instance use them in a range in the context of a list of content.

I thought it would have been easy to extract a $value from the .File.BaseFileName with functions like trim and replaceRE and use it to override a .Page.Param like .Weight , .Date or .Title (would it be set in the page front-matter or not)…

I would like to do so without an archetype nor a bash script because while they seem to be both working solutions they’re not so convenient/flexible as they require running ‘manual’ operations (creating the new page or executing the script).

@bep, this was not possible 2 years ago. Is Hugo now offering such a possibility? Or is there another way to do so ?

If not, alternatively, maybe the function range .Pages.ByParam could be extended to something like this: range .Pages.By$value ?
In which case we wouldn’t even need to be able to override any .Page.Param.

I believe filenames are great pieces of metadata.

Thanks for your help!

2

As far as I know, the only metadata that can be extracted from a filename is date. See:
https://gohugo.io/getting-started/configuration/#configure-front-matter

:filename

Fetches the date from the content file’s filename. For example, 2018-02-22-mypage.md will extract the date 2018-02-22 .

3

does it work with page bundles?

content/blog/2020/2020-09-10_test/index.md ?

4

Thanks for your answer. That’s a start. Do you know how it can be accessed from a layout template and used in a range?

5

Yes, it does.

6

single.html

Date: {{ .Date }}

list.html

{{ range .Site.RegularPages.ByDate }}
7

Thanks! I’ll test this in the evening. Very promising.

I guess date must then be formatted like this YYYY-MM-DD?
I was thinking of something with a bit more flexibility so that it can fit my organization’s naming convention like: YYMMDD_post-title.

And for special kinds like documentation or FAQ adding weight like this: 000_YYMMDD_post-title

Any ideas for .Weight and .Title ?

8

Yes, that is correct.

None that would allow you to group or sort while ranging through a collection of pages. You can certainly parse the filename, but as you pointed out in your original post, that does meet your needs.

9

Thanks a lot for your insights.

So I guess next step is to open an issue for feature request?

10

Yes, but please search through the issues and pull requests first, including closed issues and pull requests. For example:

It might be handy to use a regex to parse filenames, and allow different patterns for each content type. Something like:

[frontmatter.books]
# Example: 2010-09-14_my-title_100.md
filenamePattern = `^(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(.+)_(\d+)`
date = $1
title = $2
weight = $3

[frontmatter.movies]
# Example: 2010-09-14_99_my-title.md
filenamePattern = `^(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(.+)_(\d+)`
date = $1
title = $3
weight = $2

I suspect implementation would be expensive, and I also suspect it would be somewhat fragile in use.

If something like this were implemented, it would never satisfy all use cases. If it were me, I’d write a script to parse the filename and insert frontmatter accordingly. You could even create a directory that’s constantly monitored for new files, and trigger the script when a new file appears.

11

Great! Thanks a lot!

I see this has been a recurrent demand from the community and that nice solutions have been brought to the table.
I will have a close look at these.

Your solution seems very convenient as well.

I get that writing a script would provide an immediate working hack but isn’t a very clean solution and is not so much adapted for distributed / multi author set up with no CI/CD.

I’m thinking Rmarkdown provides an easy method with ymlthis integration in blogdown as well but all those are different stories.

12

Following up on this, I opened the issue.