PGN tag pair

PGN means Portable Game Notation, a text format for recording games. A PGN tag pair stores one descriptive fact about a game. It has four consecutive parts: an opening bracket, tag name, quoted value, and closing bracket. In [White "Carlsen, Magnus"], White is the name and Carlsen, Magnus is the value.

The name may contain only letters, digits, and underscores, and it is case-sensitive. White and white would therefore be different names. The same tag name should not appear more than once in one game's tag section.

Inside the value, a literal quotation mark is preceded by a backslash, and a literal backslash is doubled. Line breaks and tab characters are not allowed inside the quoted string.

Tag pairs are grouped at the beginning of the game before the movetext. Tags such as Event, Date, White, and Result describe the event, date, players, and outcome. Other tags can hold additional information, such as a nonstandard starting position or time control.

The PGN export format requires exactly one space between name and value, one pair per line, and a blank line after the section. Import format permits more flexible spacing and line breaks. The logical tag-pair structure remains the same.