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Tags, Spaces and Commas

You’ve been using spaces to separate your tags since you started using Delicious, but then they changed things. How does this affect Yummy?

Update: It took some time, but Delicious finally updated their API to support commas as a tag delimiter. You can read more about the update here.

In the olden days, say a month or so ago, things were much simpler. In both Delicious and Pinboard.in, you listed your tags separated by spaces. This worked both on the websites and in all third party apps.

But in late October that changed. (I don’t know the exact date, since I can’t find a blog announcing it.) Delicious decided to switch over to using commas to separate tags. The problem with using spaces to separate tags, they say, is that the tags themselves, for obvious reasons, cannot contain spaces.

However, the problem with using commas is that Delicious have not completely updated their systems to make it work with third party clients.

Let me explain.

When Yummy, or indeed any third party client, sends a list of tags to Delicious, it is expected to send a comma separated list.

When Yummy receives bookmarks from Delicious, they arrive delimited by spaces.

For example, if you enter “tag1,tag 2,tag3” on the Delicious web site, it will send that back to Yummy as “tag1 tag 2 tag3” which it has no way of interpreting as anything other than four distinct tags.

So, what should you do?

With the current version of Yummy (2.6.3), you should add and edit tags delimited with commas. I would recommend not using spaces.

I will be submitting a new version (2.6.4) in the next few days. In this, you should enter tags separated by spaces. Yummy will convert them to commas behind the scenes. But, even then, you should probably not use spaces in your tags until Delicious fix things at their end.

I would concede that this is not great. This is not the first time that Delicious has broken their API and I’m getting pretty sick of it to be honest! If you’d like to help, you can add your voice to the bug report that I raised on the Delicious support site.