Re: Character escapes in asciidoc

[John MacFarlane <jgm-TVLZxgkOlNX2fBVCVOL8/A@public.gmane.org>]

Have you seen https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/2337

The escaping "rules" seem a complete mess on asciidoc's side,
unless things have been improved since I investigated.

The "passthrough" method seems like too big a hammer.
You avoid the escape problems but you'll get very
ugly asciidoc.

Anyway, it might make sense to comment on that issue.

Jason Miller <jasnmilr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> writes:

> ~, *, +, and _ must be escaped in some cases for asciidoc (and all cases 
> when doubled).  The rules for when they must be escaped is fairly confusing 
> and backslash-escaping is disallowed when either the escaping is 
> non-mandatory or the characters are doubled.
>
> I'm willing to submit a patch, but wanted some thoughts on the approach 
> first
>
> Simple test-case that shows the issue:
>
> ---
> pandoc -f html -t asciidoctor /dev/stdin <<EOF
> <p>*foo*</p>
> <p><b>foo</b></p>
> EOF
> ---
>
> Will yield identical asciidoc (with strong tag) for both paragraphs and 
> results in bolded text for both cases.
>
> I have found two ways to escape that work in both asciidoc and asciidoctor 
> (with examples using an asterisk):
>
> 1. Define an attribute for each character that needs to be escaped, and use 
> that; the definitions can go anywhere in the document before being used, 
> with the header being typical:
>
> ---
> :star: *
>
> {star}
> ---
>
> 2. Use a passthrough:
>
> ---
> pass:specialcharacters[*]
> ---
>
> #2 lets you escape any arbitrary strings, so escapeString could just render 
> any string with special characters as:
>
> pass:specialcharacters[this is some text that has * special + characters]
>
> I'm leaning towards implementing #2 as it's easier to implement and #1 
> requires rendering the header correctly.  #1 probably is closer to how I 
> would hand-write these escapes though.
>
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