title: Syntax of Metadata role: manual tags: #manual #syntax #zettelstore syntax: zmk back: 00001006000000 00001006020000 00001006031500 00001007701000 00001007702000 00001012053200 00001012054200 backward: 00001006000000 00001006020000 00001006031500 00001007701000 00001007702000 00001012053200 00001012054200 box-number: 1 copyright: (c) 2020-present by Detlef Stern created: 20210126175322 lang: en license: EUPL-1.2-or-later modified: 20251212134036 published: 20251212134036 visibility: public The metadata of a zettel is a collection of key-value pairs. The syntax roughly resembles the internal header of an email ([RFC5322](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5322)). The key is a sequence of alphanumeric characters, a hyphen-minus character (“`-`”, U+002D) is also allowed. It begins at the first position of a new line. Uppercase letters of a key are translated to their lowercase equivalents. A key is separated from its value either by * a colon character (“`:`”), * a non-empty sequence of space characters, * a sequence of space characters, followed by a colon, followed by a sequence of space characters. A value is a sequence of printable characters. If the value should be continued in the following line, that following line (“continuation line”) must begin with a non-empty sequence of space characters. The rest of the following line will be interpreted as the next part of the value. There can be more than one continuation line for a value. A non-continuation line that contains a possibly empty sequence of characters, followed by the percent sign character (“`%`”) is treated as a comment line. It will be ignored. Parsing metadata ends, if an empty line is found or if a line with at least three hyphen-minus characters is found. Some examples: title1:The Title title-2 : Another title title-3: A wrapped title title-4: A wrapped title with more than one continuation line % A comment line % Another comment line. No metadata anymore, because of the empty line.