Insert Text At Placeholder In Periodic Note
"Periodic Note" is a collective term for Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly Notes. In v1.3+, Periodic Notes replace what was previously only available for Daily Notes.
🚨 Working with Daily Notes requires either the core Daily Notes plugin or the Periodic Notes community plugin. Working with Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly or Yearly Notes requires the Periodic Notes community plugin.
Searches the current Daily/ Weekly/ Monthly/ Quarterly/ Yearly Note for a specified placeholder and either adds text above it, below it, or replaces it entirely.
A "placeholder" is a one-line comment: a piece of text enclosed in double percent signs, e.g. %%My Placeholder%% . Since Obsidian does not render the comment outside of edit mode, it is perfect for marking places in a document where text can be added later.
The %%placeholder%% style is used in the body of the note, the #placeholder# style is used in the front matter (which is YAML and not compatible with Markdown's percent style).
If the placeholder parameter doesn't contain any delimiters (i.e., if %% or # is omitted), the action will enclose the placeholder in %% percent signs. However, it is recommended not to omit them.
This action returns an error if there is no Periodic Note of the selected type for the current date, so it's best to use it after the "Check For Existence Of Periodic Note" action has determined that it actually exists.
Available Options
Allow empty replacement
Usually, the replacement will contain something. If it doesn't, Shortcuts would ask for it. However, if you want to allow empty replacements, enable this option.
Where should the text be inserted?
The text can be placed above the placeholder, below it or it can replace the placeholder entirely.
Hint: When adding items to a list, and you want to add new items to the end of the list, select "above placeholder"; if new items are supposed to go to the top of the list, select "below placeholder".
Examples
Suppose your current Daily Note has the following content, including a placeholder %%placeholder1%% . We'll insert the texts text 1 , text 2 and text 3 in sequence.
## Headline 1
%%placeholder1%%
## Headline 2
something else
Inserting above the placeholder
The result would be:
## Headline 1
text 1
text 2
text 3
%%placeholder1%%
## Headline 2
something else
Inserting below the placeholder
The result would be:
## Headline 1
%%placeholder1%%
text 3
text 2
text 1
## Headline 2
something else
This is because after text 1 is inserted, text 2 is placed directly below the placeholder (as it should be), i.e. in-between the placeholder and text 1 .
Replacing the placeholder
The result this time:
## Headline 1
text 1
## Headline 2
something else
The first insertion replaced the placeholder, and text 2 and text 3 have nowhere to go.
Changes / History
v1.3
- Replaces the hard-coded Daily Note target with the ability to select Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly Notes.
v1.2
- Adds support for YAML-compatible placeholders, i.e.
#placeholder#.