Document `workflow_run` behaviour when workflow name contains special characters

[starizard]

Code of Conduct

• I have read and agree to the GitHub Docs project's Code of Conduct

What article on docs.github.com is affected?

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/events-that-trigger-workflows#workflow_run

What changes are you suggesting?

[possible bug]
workflows triggered by workflow_run do not work if the workflow name contains characters like [ ]

for example:

name: "[foo] parent"
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - "main"
    paths:
      - cloud/**
.
.
.

this parent workflow should trigger the child workflow

name: "[bar] child"
on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows:
      - "[foo] parent"
    branches:
      - main
    types:
      - completed
.
.
.

but it doesn't trigger the child workflow,

removing [foo] from the workflow name makes it work

Additional information

No response

[welcome]

Thanks for opening this issue. A GitHub docs team member should be by to give feedback soon. In the meantime, please check out the contributing guidelines.

[ramyaparimi]

@starizard
Thanks so much for opening this issue! I'll get this triaged for review ⚡

[nikordaris]

are there any other special characters to avoid? Also, is the solution to just not use those special characters in your workflow names?

[lucascosti]

Hi @starizard, thanks for reporting this. I'm not totally sure if this is a bug or not, so before we update the docs, I've asked the Actions engineering team to clarify. Stay tuned.

[lucascosti]

Hi @starizard, I've checked with the engineering team, and I can confirm that this is a known bug.

As a workaround until this issue is fixed, you can escape the square brackets in the workflow_run workflow and it should work. For example:

on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: \[foo\] parent

I've tried a few other special characters, and they don't seem to be affected by this bug.

We don't document bugs in our documentation, so I'll close this docs issue.

For anyone else experiencing problems with this, please contact the [GitHub Support Community] or (https://github.community/) GitHub Support 🙂.