Post.data['slug'] is… not slugified?

Help
1

Hi.
I am trying to connect some stuff up in a template, hoping to match on a post’s slug. Tried so many things to no avail until I finally decided to dump the post.data and to my dismay…

"title": "A Second Note",
"permalink": "/notes/:year/:month/:day/:slug",
"slug": "A Second Note",

The permalink and all links all work and are slugified properly… but for some reason in the data it’s untouched. I was of course expecting:

"slug": "a-second-note",

Kinda scratching my head here… why would this be?
And more importantly, how to fix it?

Thanks!

2

The permalink and slug are combined to form the url property. So page.url should contain something like: /notes/2020/7/24/a-second-note

3

Thanks @chuckhoupt
Except, the .slug is not slugified, and the .url isn’t something I can match my string against.

I suppose I can write Liquid code to parse the .url, but .slug should be, you know, the slug. No? :slight_smile:

4

Are you explicitly setting the slug in the post’s front-matter? When slug is explicitly set in the front-matter, Jekyll won’t overwrite it.

Normally, .slug is generated by feeding the title thru the sluggify filter [correction: it’s base on file name], but if a slug is found in the front-matter, then it will be used instead of the title (but still fed thru the sluggify filter, just in case it isn’t properly formatted).

Ideally, an explicitly set slug should be a correctly formatted URL component (i.e. “a-second-note”). However, to auto-correct errors, Jekyll applies the sluggify filter to ensure consistent URLs. So a slug like “A Second Note” will appear in the URL as “a-second-note”.

You might be able to use the sluggify filter to help with matching…

5

Thanks again @chuckhoupt

I am not setting the slug in the front matter.
I was totally expecting the Jekyll-generated slug in the data struct to be slugified but it is not. Perhaps a config issue?
(I am running latest Jekyll)

6

Odd, when I eval the slug in Liquid, I always get the generated slug. For example: {{ site.posts[0].slug }} or {{ page.slug }} will eval to “welcome-to-jekyll” in a freshly created Jekyll site (4.1.1).

You mention Post.data['slug'], but I don’t recognize that as Liquid. Maybe you’re writing a Ruby plugin? That might explain the confusion.

7

Aha ok mystery.
Definitely in a template.
Right after <body> I insert
Page Slug: {{ page.slug }}
and I get:
Page Slug: A First Note
( at localhost/2020/07/26/a-first-note )

8

Ok so I installed a clean test site and here’s what I found.

page.slug is not the title slugified. It is a straight copy of the source filename. (In the case of posts, it strips the date, which is ignored anyways if the front matter has a date… weird behavior as well.)

So, a source filename like
_posts/2020-07-20-A First Post.md
will give a slug of
A First Post
regardless of what is or isn’t in the front matter.

Only a source filename like
_posts/2020-07-20-a-first-post.md
will give a slug of
a-first-post

Very surprising and disappointing. Users don’t write slugs, they write titles. But the system can use and rely on “automatically slugified” titles, and this behavior breaks that potential.

I wonder if this is a bug?

Guess I’ll be parsing page.url in Liquid:
{%- assign realslug = page.url | split:'/' | last -%}
<pre>Post URL : {{ page.url }}</pre>
<pre>Real Slug: {{ realslug }}</pre>

Edit: So this doesn’t solve my particular problem as I am querying the post data which needs a real slug to be present there to work. Maybe I need to write a plugin to push that in.

Anyways, thank you @chuckhoupt for your help! :+1: