What causes "parse attribute view rich text failed" in siyuan-note/siyuan?

Inspect and repair the rich.Content string — re-enter the cell text in the SiYuan UI

parse attribute view rich text failed

Error message

parse attribute view rich text failed

What it means

parseValueTextRich feeds the kramdown content through luteEngine.Md2BlockDOMTree and expects a non-nil tree with a non-nil root. If Lute returns nil (or a tree without a root) the function cannot proceed and returns this generic parse-failure error, indicating the content could not be turned into a valid block DOM tree.

Source

Thrown at kernel/av/value.go:577

	}
	if ValueTextRichSpec != rich.Spec {
		err = fmt.Errorf("unsupported attribute view rich text spec [%d]", rich.Spec)
		return
	}
	if ValueTextRichFormatKramdown != rich.Format {
		err = fmt.Errorf("unsupported attribute view rich text format [%s]", rich.Format)
		return
	}

	luteEngine := newValueTextRichLute()
	content, protectedStyleEntities, protectErr := protectValueTextRichKramdownStyleEntities(rich.Content)
	if nil != protectErr {
		err = protectErr
		return
	}
	blockDOM, tree = luteEngine.Md2BlockDOMTree(content, true)
	if nil == tree || nil == tree.Root {
		err = fmt.Errorf("parse attribute view rich text failed")
		return
	}
	if 0 < len(protectedStyleEntities) {
		if err = restoreValueTextRichTreeStyleEntities(tree, protectedStyleEntities); nil != err {
			return
		}
		blockDOM = luteEngine.Tree2BlockDOM(tree, luteEngine.RenderOptions, luteEngine.ParseOptions)
	}
	err = validateValueTextRichTree(tree)
	return
}

func validateValueTextRichTree(tree *parse.Tree) (err error) {
	if nil == tree || nil == tree.Root {
		return fmt.Errorf("attribute view rich text tree is missing")
	}
	ast.Walk(tree.Root, func(node *ast.Node, entering bool) ast.WalkStatus {
		if !entering {

View on GitHub (pinned to 8641553a1f)

Solutions

Inspect and repair the rich.Content string — re-enter the cell text in the SiYuan UI
Simplify the content: strip unusual inline markup and re-add formatting incrementally
Restore the cell from a backup/snapshot taken before the content was corrupted
Check the Lute/lute.min.js version matches the kernel build and update if drifted

Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Try / catch

blockDOM, tree, err := av.ParseValueTextRich(rich)
if err != nil {
    // fall back to plain text: use rich.Content stripped of markup
}

Prevention

Keep the cell content to ordinary inline kramdown; avoid exotic constructs
Keep Lute and the kernel versions in sync
Back up the database before bulk-editing rich-text cells

When it happens

Trigger: Md2BlockDOMTree returning nil/empty for the (style-entity-protected) kramdown content — e.g. content that reduces to nothing after entity protection, or a Lute engine initialized in an unexpected state. Reached via ParseValueTextRich or NormalizeValueTextRich.

Common situations: Rich-text content consisting only of exotic constructs that the protection layer rewrites away; corrupted cell content in the database; Lute version drift between the persisted markup dialect and the engine.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Invalid ... format", "must be in format X", "does not look like a ..." — invalid argument format errors across CLI tools and libraries — this error's family across 17 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of siyuan-note/siyuan@8641553a1f (2026-09-11). Data as JSON: /api/errors/e2dde3e2ec83e27e. Report an issue: GitHub.