Why become simple square brackets escaped and how to turn this off?

Why become simple square brackets escaped and how to turn this off?

['Marcel Otto' via pandoc-discuss]

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Hi,

why does Pandoc escape simple square brackets?

$ echo "[Foo]" | pandoc --from=markdown --to=markdown
\[Foo\]

Since some Markdown tools will interpret this as LaTeX math, I don't want 
to lose portability and turn this behaviour off. Is this possible somehow?

Thanks in advance,
Marcel

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Re: Why become simple square brackets escaped and how to turn this off?

[John MacFarlane]

"'Marcel Otto' via pandoc-discuss"
> Hi,
>
> why does Pandoc escape simple square brackets?
>
> $ echo "[Foo]" | pandoc --from=markdown --to=markdown
> \[Foo\]

Because [Foo] can otherwise be interpreted as a reference link.

> Since some Markdown tools will interpret this as LaTeX math, I don't want 
> to lose portability and turn this behaviour off. Is this possible somehow?

3 solutions, none pretty:

1) Use sed on the output to substitute [ for \[, etc.

2) Write a lua filter that splits up Str elements containing [
or ] and replaces these with a RawInline Markdown element with
the character.  (Raw markdown gets passed through and won't be
escaped.)

3) Write `[`{=markdown}Foo`]`{=markdown} in your document.