How can I use forward slashes and curly braces/brackets in page titles

[marjanvenema]

Confluence prevents from saving a page if the page title contains an "illegal" character and gives me the following message:

Page titles can not contain (:, @, /, \, |, ^, #, ;, [, ], {, }, <, >) or start with ($, .., ~).

As I am developing and documenting a restful API, I really, really need to be able to have forward slashes and curly braces (or brackets) in the page title.

I know I can use U+2044 or U+2215 as alternatives for the forward slash, but that is not really convenient when trying to search for those pages. Also, I haven't been able to find alternatives for the curly braces. I have also tried to "ampersand encode" the characters, but that of course fails on the closing semi-colon...

Is there a way to show the forward slash and curly brace characters in a page title and still have those pages easily searchable on title?

[Deleted user · Accepted solution]

I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but I think I read somewhere that you can use currently-illegal characters in page titles in Confluence 4.x. It was listed as one of the huge benefits of getting rid of wiki markup.

But from a technical writing point of view, I think the workaround you describe is a better decision anyway. It's usually better to give the pages a more human-readable title.

[marjanvenema]

Thanks for that. I'll ask our administrator why we are still on 2.9.2 :-)

[Deleted user]

Heh :) Take care before you move all the way to 4.x - it's very different from earlier versions because there is only a rich text editor, no wiki markup at all. And check that all your plugins still work. Good luck.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I don't think you can do this. Many of the characters you've got there simply aren't valid in urls as plain characters, so they *must* be escaped. Even if you bodged Confluence code (in the core of Confluence) to allow the page creation, you'd end up with invalid urls that browsers couldn't follow.

I suggest you go back to the application that wants to use them and fix that so it only asks for valid urls, because it sounds broken to me.

[marjanvenema]

The app is fine. It simply needs to navigate to http://[domain]/angles/id1;id2;id3 and that's fine. I need/want(ed) confluence to accept "/angles/{ids}" (without the quotes) as the page title as that was the description of the API method being documented. Since decided on another naming scheme, avoiding the illegal characters, so now the "/angles/{ids}" method is documented under the "Angles by ids" page title.

[marjanvenema]

Maybe more human-friendly for non-geeks, but having pages named by the actual method name, ie /angles/{ids} is a lot more helpful for us programming nerds... :-)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ah, so the application isn't broken really, it's just the decision to try to use invalid characters. That's good. I much prefer your new naming scheme - it gets rid of the invalid character problems, but far more importantly in my opinion, it's a lot more human-friendly.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, but if it breaks your browser, it doesn't help anyone! :-)

Actually, the last place I was at used a neat trick - they use bidirectional trackbacks in Confluence to link to another system, and then a simple macro on each confluence page to generate the "broken" name in the other system. That would then pick up the valid confluence url and hence you had the link you wanted.