Winter Rant

I have been wondering: how would WordPress tags federate when they have spaces?

In a couple of recent WordPress posts I absentmindedly end up using such tags (i.e., with spaces): “Year in Review” and “user feedback”.

Here are the screenshots of two such tags (two different blog posts):

When federating over to Mastodon it seems that the spaces in the tags are dropped, and the first letter (character) of each word in capitalized. Here is “Year in Review” rendered as “#YearInReview … notice that “in” is converted to “In” when the spaces are dropped.

Similarly, here is “user feedback” converted to “#userFeedback”.

• One fun note: “u” in “user” is left unchanged, so it seems the case of the first letter in the hashtag will go unchanged.
• Another fun note: “software-engineering” on WP became “#softwareEngineering” on Mastodon. So it seems that this #tag translation does not just apply to tags with spaces, but also dashes, and perhaps other special characters(?). (Will test soon! Update: testing done, and special character handling is happening.)

– vijay, putting together some Ikea furniture 🪑