# Tag Naming, Characters not allowed **URL:** \ **Category:** Ignition\ **Tags:** ignition81\ **Created:** [December 7, 2021, 3:31pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840 "2021-12-07T15:31:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![francois.beduneau](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8baadc/32.png) [@francois.beduneau](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/francois.beduneau)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2021, 3:31pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/1 "2021-12-07T15:31:46Z")
Hi There, I’m facing some difficulties to create tag using non Latin characters. _Context: the user can create tags through a vision application by using the function system.tag.configure()_ I would like to create a kind of filter to only take “authorized characters”. I saw in the docs that ignition is very permissive about the tag name : [Tag Naming](https://docs.inductiveautomation.com/display/DOC81/Tags) But I wonder what mean _“valid unicode letter”_, is it something like “unicode category” to avoid ([Unicode category](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_character_property)) or some “unicode block” ([unicode block](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block)) not allowed, or something else… 🤔 Does anyone have more information or clarification on which characters are allowed/ not allowed? Thanks in advance, Francois. ---
**Author:** ![victordcq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f6c823/32.png) [@victordcq](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/victordcq)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2021, 3:39pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/2 "2021-12-07T15:39:48Z")
Idk what is all possible but You could use try except. And send popup message about the (name) error. it atleast seems easier than trying to filter userinput yourself ---
**Author:** ![francois.beduneau](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8baadc/32.png) [@francois.beduneau](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/francois.beduneau)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2021, 4:20pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/3 "2021-12-07T16:20:07Z")
Sadly the function “system.tag.configure()” don’t throw any error… The error come from the gateway and appear in the gateway log. e.g:_(Logger: Provider, Error\_Configuration(“The name ‘------- Tag Name ----------’ is not a valid tag name”))_ ---
**Author:** ![lrose](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/lrose/32/62724_2.png) [@lrose](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/lrose)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2021, 4:22pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/4 "2021-12-07T16:22:43Z")
You can’t have a `-` as the first character in a tag name. But perhaps that is just you redacting the tag name? ---
**Author:** ![Kevin.Herron](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/kevin.herron/32/7259_2.png) [@Kevin.Herron](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/Kevin.Herron)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2021, 4:29pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/6 "2021-12-07T16:29:55Z")
Found this in some test code... seems accurate? > Valid names start with a letter or underscore, and contain any of: letters, digits, underscore, space, parenthesis, single quote, dash, or colon. ---
**Author:** ![francois.beduneau](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8baadc/32.png) [@francois.beduneau](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/francois.beduneau)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2021, 10:34am UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/7 "2021-12-08T10:34:47Z")
Actually I need more precision... When I said: > I’m facing some difficulties to create tag using non Latin characters. I meant I have issues with **non Latin alphabet**. exemple: I currently have some issues with some characters from Thai alphabet: ชื้; ลี่;... For example, this character "ลี่" is a concatenation of ล + ี + ่ (unicode: \u0e25\u0e35\u0e48) and this one is not allowed in the tag name. But if I take only "ล" (\u0e25) it works. I suppose I will have the different or same issue with other alphabet / syllabary (Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, ...). **This is why I wanted more precision about what is allowed / not allowed and then create a filter function to remove every "forbidden" characters.** So far I use this function: ```auto import unicodedata # Function to return Valid Tag name # Input: Original Name (Unicode) # Output: Normalized name (Unicode) def NormalizeName(OriginalName): print "OriginalName: ", OriginalName, " Type: ", type(OriginalName) MyNormalizeName = '' # Init Normalize Name for characters in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', OriginalName): print characters, " -> ", unicodedata.category(characters) if unicodedata.category(characters) != 'Mn': # Filter on Category Mn (Nonspacing mark) MyNormalizeName += characters # Concatenate ONarmalize name #print MyNormalizeName print "MyNormalizeName: ", MyNormalizeName, " Type: ", type(MyNormalizeName) return MyNormalizeName ``` The problem with this one is I remove every diacritic ([Diacritic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic)), so it is less permissive than what Ignition allow... 🙁 ---
**Author:** ![victordcq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f6c823/32.png) [@victordcq](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/victordcq)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2021, 10:57am UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/8 "2021-12-08T10:57:29Z")
just avoid any wierd characters like that, maybe some work for ignition but they will cause trouble else where for sure xd ---
**Author:** ![pascal.fragnoud](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/pascal.fragnoud/32/24728_2.png) [@pascal.fragnoud](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/pascal.fragnoud)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2021, 11:13am UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/9 "2021-12-08T11:13:37Z")
I agree with victor here, I’d use only `[a-z][A-Z][0-9]` and `_` ( `"^[a-zA-Z0-9_]*$"`) for tag names. Now, it would be cool to have a `displayName` prop on tags, that would be used for things like tag browsers, that would accept any character. ---
**Author:** ![pturmel](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/pturmel/32/3295_2.png) [@pturmel](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/pturmel)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2021, 1:26pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/10 "2021-12-08T13:26:34Z")
Tags have a standard documentation property that can contain anything you like. ---
**Author:** ![francois.beduneau](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8baadc/32.png) [@francois.beduneau](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/francois.beduneau)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2021, 1:48pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/11 "2021-12-08T13:48:51Z")
Thank you guys, In some way I agree with you, it would be much more easier to limit the tag name to these characters. But unfortunately I don’t create an application for me and for some user it won’t make sense of not using a local language, in addition it’s a pity to not use the flexibility of ignition on tags naming. ---
**Author:** ![Kevin.Herron](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/kevin.herron/32/7259_2.png) [@Kevin.Herron](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/Kevin.Herron)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2021, 2:46pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/12 "2021-12-08T14:46:13Z")
The tag naming is ultimately enforced via regular expression that looks for characters in the unicode letter categories (`p{\L}`), which unfortunately means multi-byte character sequences that contain a letter and then characters in a non-letter unicode category (u0e35 and u0e48 are both “nonspacing mark”) will not match the regex and therefore not be considered a valid tag name. ---
**Author:** ![francois.beduneau](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8baadc/32.png) [@francois.beduneau](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/francois.beduneau)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2021, 9:31am UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/13 "2021-12-09T09:31:46Z")
Great, This is exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you for your support! For those interested, here is the filter function to convert a unicode to a valid tag name: ```auto import unicodedata # Function to return Valid Tag name # Input: Original Name (Unicode) # Output: Valid tag name (Unicode) def ToValidTagName(OriginalName): AuthoCategory = ["Lu","Ll","Lt","Lm","Lo"] # Authorized Unicode Category AuthoFirstCharct = ["_","0","1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9"] # Authorized Characters (First possition and other) AuthoOther = [" ","'","-",":","(",")"] # Other Characters Authorized (Except first position). ValidTagName = '' # Init Tag Name for characters in OriginalName: if unicodedata.category(characters) in AuthoCategory: # Filter on Category ValidTagName += characters elif characters in AuthoFirstCharct: # Filter On characters allowed everywhere ValidTagName += characters elif characters in AuthoOther and len(ValidTagName)!=0: # Filter On character Allowed if not in first possition ValidTagName += characters else: #print "Not Authorized Characters: ", characters pass return ValidTagName ``` ---
**Author:** ![victordcq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f6c823/32.png) [@victordcq](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/victordcq)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2021, 9:41am UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/14 "2021-12-09T09:41:15Z")
you might want to give it a “replace” character to indicate an unknown character was used ---
**Author:** ![pascal.fragnoud](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/pascal.fragnoud/32/24728_2.png) [@pascal.fragnoud](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/pascal.fragnoud)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2021, 9:42am UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/tag-naming-characters-not-allowed/53840/15 "2021-12-09T09:42:02Z")
And to avoid ending up with an empty tag name