Create appointment with leading parenthesis

Question

If I click in Google calendar (month view) and create an appointment with start time and leading parenthesis like this:

the leading parenthesis gets dropped and this is what I see in the calendar:

Is there anything that I can do to prevent this (special spacing, escape characters, ...)?

Answer 1

This is bad parsing on Google's part: the code (perhaps a regular expression) that they use to extract the time and title of event from the entered string does not believe that the name of an event can begin with a non-word character. The issue is not specific to ( - if you begin the event name with !@#$%^& and so on, these will all be removed.

Luckily, the zero-width space is acceptable. The characters shown below include a zero-width space between the regular space and parentheses. You can copy them and use when creating events:

 ​(

For example: 9:30 ​(Car) Vet can be copy-pasted and will create an event with the correct title.