How can I remove unwanted hyphens + numbers after my page titles?

[matt_hawkins]

I want my page to be titled, "Task List for Lesson 01" but CANVAS is adding hyphenated numbers to the title, which is really annoying because the ONLY number I want displayed is the 01.

Here is a SNIP of what I am looking at:

        

When I try to edit the offending -hyphenated numbers out of the title, CANVAS just tacks on an even higher (unwanted) hyphenated number.

Can someone please help me remove these hypens and numbers?

Thanks in advance,

Matt in Pa.

[kblack · Accepted solution]

Hi  @matt_hawkins  - That issue comes about when Canvas detects a page name with the exact same title.  One of two things occurred:  you either already had a page with the title Task List of Lesson 01 OR (more likely) you imported the contents of a previously-taught course that had those same page names into the course site in question.  Canvas will not overwrite existing content in a course site...it will append it, and in the cases of duplicate names, it will add a number with a hyphen before it.  If this course has been imported before and you have files in it, you may find similar names among your FILES.

You best short-term solution is to head to Pages in your course menu, and then click View All Pages.  There you will see a listing of all of your pages, of course, and be able to start renaming or deleting the pages with the same name.  You should also take a look at some of the discussion under a somewhat similar question in the past here:  Getting rid of numbers at the end of page titles after importing .

If the issue arose from importing, in the future you may want to import just selected items rather than an entire course site, as covered here:  https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-13101-4152497985   At my own institution, I have seen many a Canvas site with numbers as high as 09 or 10, so this is a fairly common issue with imports back and forth between courses as people fine-tune exactly what they want each page to say, keeping the previous one intact.  It's just a matter of later doing a bit of clean-up, something that I myself tend to put off!

I hope this helps a bit, Matthew!

[EricPeterson]

The best solution would be for Canvas to fix an obvious bug.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello @EricPeterson ...

IMHO, I don't know that I would characterize this as a bug.  Reading through @kblack's response from a few years back, he does a really good job of explaining why duplicate page names are not allowed.  As I've built courses for our faculty at our school, if I ever had a page with the same name that was used in the same module (we call them Learning Plans), I would name the page something like:

• Learning Plan 1: Tent Camping Activity (or LP1: Tent Camping Activity)
• Learning Plan 2: Tent Camping Activity (or LP2: Tent Camping Activity)

Doing it this way guarantees that I'm not going to have "Tent Camping Activity" and "Tent Camping Activity-2" pages names.  So, you might want to consider something similar for your course.  Just a suggestion...for what it's worth.  Hope this helps.

[gwied]

A similar example:

Each of 14 Modules has an "introduction" page. It would seem "clean" to name them each simply "Introduction", since the context in the Modules view is obvious to the viewer -- but that's NOT how the Canvas engine sees the page, ie., Canvas sees all pages in flat, non-heirachical storage. 

Thus, we name each introduction page according to its parentage, eg., "Module 1 Introduction", "Module 2 Introduction", etc.

[gwied]

This is an excellent reply. I have used similar advice for my own tidying-up!

[matt_hawkins]

Thanks, Ken, for taking the time to answer my question. This is very helpful to me!

Sincerely,

Matt

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello  @matt_hawkins ...

I've marked  @kblack 's response as "Correct" because he has provided you with great feedback (as you've seen).  In my experience, when I have built courses for our instructors and run into this same issue, I will usually put the Learning Plan (or however you name your Modules) number in front of the content item name.  So, for example:

• LP1: Building a Tent
• LP2: Building a Tent
• etc.

Just another thought for you as you build out your content.  Hope this helps.