gray-matter

gray-matter is a library that support parsing front-matter from a string or file. This is useful when you handle .md file for some reasons. By default it parses YAML-formatted-frontmatter, but it can be used for JSON, TOML as well.

In Obsidian, you can parse frontmatter from a specific note, using gray-matter like

import { App, TFile } from 'obsidian';
 
const matter = require("gray-matter")
 
export class Example {
	private app: App;
	
	constructor(app: App) { 
		this.app = app; 
	}
	
	async parseFrontmatter(filePath: string): FrontmatterProperty[] {
		const targetTFile = this.app.vault.getAbsoluteFileByPath(filePath);
		const content = await app.vault.read(targetTFile);
		const parsedContent = matter(content);
		const properties: FrontmatterProperties[] = [];
		
		for (const [key, value] of Object.entries(parsedContent.data)) {
			properties.push({
				key: key,
				defaultValue: String(value),
				enable: true
			})
		}
		
		return properties;
	}
}
 
export interface FrontmatterProperty {
	key: string,
	defaultValue: string,
	enabled: boolean
}

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Note

I’m developing a basic plugin for mass-creation of daily-notes with keeping a specific properties (from frontmatter). While I’m searching for a way to handle this (cuz native support from Obsidian about parsing frontmatter wasn’t enough…), I found this and pretty useful and simple to use.

References

• gray-matter
• Parsing and Removing Frontmatter in Obsidian Plugins