Escaping special characters in a markdown frontmatter in Astro

Recently, I ran into an issue while utilizing Astro with Content Collections where I needed to escape some special characters.

In my case, I wanted to add a dots character (:) in the frontmatter YAML title of a markdown file.

If we simply add the dots like this:

title: Markdown frontmatter title: using dots

We will get the following error:

InvalidContentEntryFrontmatterError
Content entry frontmatter does not match schema

We are going to see several solutions.

Using quotes

"undefined" anchor link

The easiest solution is just to quote the title content.

title: 'Markdown frontmatter title: using dots'

Block scalar styles

"undefined" anchor link

But also, we can use these two YAML block styles:

• YAML block scalar with folded style.

title: >
  Markdown frontmatter title: using dots

• YAML block scalar with literal style.

title: |
  Markdown frontmatter title: using dots

I hope you found this article useful.

Happy coding! 🚀