Punctuation Guide for Behavior Tags

Owned by Kirstin Marcon (Deactivated)
Last updated: Jan 23, 2024 by Karen Greaves (Deactivated)
2 min read

IMPORTANT: When creating a behavior tag you need to match the word or phrase in your corpus, including supported punctuation, to the word or phrase included in the tag. This means if you have the phrase I don’t, do you in your corpus, then include all the punctuation in your tag; not I dont do you.

Working with Behavior Tags on Mac

These punctuation marks have been tested on both Mac and PC. Although they all work on both, for Mac we recommend copying text for Behavior Tags into Digital DNA from a plain text editor to ensure invisible characters are removed, instead of copying and pasting from other sources. 

In the tags, you may use:

  • Commas e.g. “Thanks, mate” and “ thanks,”

  • Full stops at the end of words e.g. “end.”

  • Quote marks e.g. “some say”

  • Single quotation marks e.g. “someday ‘soon’ “

  • Apostrophes e.g. “don’t”

  • Exclamation marks e.g. “wow!”

  • Dollar signs e.g. “$100”

  • Percent signs e.g. “100%”

  • Carat symbol e.g. “24^ gold”

  • Hyphen e.g. “day-time”

  • Backslashes e.g “day\night”

  • Single forward-slashes e.g. “night/day”

  • Colons e.g. “list:”

  • Semicolons e.g “could end but;”

  • Question marks e.g. “who?”

  • Tilde e.g. “~twenty”

  • Back quote e.g. “`acute” (note: can’t use it as an apostrophe e.g. “don`t”, it will read out “don back quote t”)

  • Underscore e.g. “little_one”

  • Equals sign e.g. “one=one”

  • Parenthesize e.g. “(a potato)”

  • Plus sign e.g. “You + me”

In the tags, you may not use:

  • Leading spaces e.g “   hello” (fixes on the way for this)

  • Trailing spaces e.g. “goodbye   “  (fixes on the way for this)

  • Full stops between words e.g. “Please. Stop”

  • At symbol at start of word e.g “@night”

  • Hash symbol e.g. “#goodvibes”

  • Ampersand e.g “one & only”

  • Asterix e.g. *bold*

  • Brackets e.g. “[blocked]”

  • Braces e.g. “{impact}”

  • Bar e.g. “|or|”

  • Multiple forward-slashes e.g “left//right”

  • Greater than e.g. “this>that”

  • Less than e.g. “that<this”

In your corpus, you may not use:

  • At symbol at the start of the word e.g. “@hello” - (“hello@email.com” is fine.)

  • Hash symbol e.g. “#goodvibes”

  • Square brackets e.g. “[blocked]

  • Asterix e.g. *bold*