What constitutes a valid field name? (Old templates broken)

Anki Card Design
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From AnkiDroid Bug#9297 it seems like AnkiDesktop stopped accepting field names with spaces in between letters somewhere between version 2.1.13 and 2.1.44 (Based on the changelog, I suspect it’s 2.1.20). More specifically, AnkiDesktop now fails to recognise {{Definition: 大辞泉}} instead believing it to be a replacement for the non-existing field 大辞泉 thus failing to render anything.

After reading all changelogs after 2.1.13, reading the doc paged linked in 2.1.20’s changelog and reconsulting the regular template documentation¹, I cannot find any mention of spaces in the middle of a field being illegal or any other reason why Definition: 大辞泉 would be an invalid field name. On the contrary actually, the doc¹ even uses names with spaces {{Field 1}} and {{Field 2}} as examples.
It is ofc possible I missed something since it was a fair bit to read through `^^

It would be awesome if someone could clarify whether this specific breaking change was intentional and what exactly constitutes a valid field name.
If disallowing spaces inside field names was indeed intentional, I’m suggesting to update the documentation to use different examples and to also include a definition of valid field names in the docs.

¹: docs.ankiweb . net/templates/fields.html (I’m not allowed to use three links directly …)

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Colons have a special meaning in field replacements, so they are no longer permitted in field names. Removing the colon from the field name and template should resolve the issue.

1 Like
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Thanks! So it was the colon and not the space.

To come back to “what is a valid field name”, is it correct that everything which satisfies the following is a valid field name (and likely not break in the future)?:

  • must start with a non-whitespace character which also isn’t #, / or ^
    (For future compatibility perhaps best start with a non-ASCII-, ASCII-letter- or ASCII-number-glyph)
  • must end with a non-whitespace character
  • must not contain a colon : anywhere

Imho it would be good to add something like this to the docs, so it’s easier to find such errors and to minimise field names breaking with updates.

4

Recent Anki versions will warn you if you use a character that is not permitted when renaming or adding a field.