escaping double asterisks and underscores

[yareeba]

Hello,

I'm using your library to convert HTML to markdown. I am running into problems whenever there are double asterisks (**) next to/within <strong> tags or when text within <em> tags includes an underscore (_). For example, when converting:

<p>This is <strong>**bold</strong> text and this is <em>italic_text</em></p> 

the markdown returned is:

This is ****bold** text and this is _italic_text_

Is there any way to escape these characters during the conversion?

So the markdown returned is more like:

This is **\*\*bold** text and this is _italic\_text_ 

Thanks

[domchristie]

Thanks for this. I think it's related to #220 (escaping is hard!). I will mark this as a bug. Thanks again.

[olih]

Hi,

I work on the same team as Areeba, and eventually we decided to use an escaping that would be quite aggressive as the markdown does not have to be really user friendly.

We realised that we could overload the escape method in the prototype:

const turndown = new Turndown({ headingStyle: 'atx' });
turndown.escape = escapeMarkdown;

In this case, we have written a custom escaping method that takes care of most special characters in markdown:

const markdownReplacements = [
  [/\*/g, '\\*'],
  [/_/g, '\\_'],
  [/-/g, '\\-'],
  [/\+/g, '\\+'],
  [/=/g, '\\='],
  [/#/g, '\\#'],
  [/`/g, '\\`'],
  [/~/g, '\\~'],
  [/&/g, '&'],
  [/\|/g, '\\|'],
  [/\(/g, '\\('],
  [/\)/g, '\\)'],
  [/\[/g, '\\['],
  [/\]/g, '\\]'],
  [/</g, '&lt;'],
  [/>/g, '&gt;'],
  [/(\d+)\./g, '$1\\.'],
];

const escapeMarkdown = text =>
  markdownReplacements.reduce(
    (search, replacement) => search.replace(replacement[0], replacement[1]),
    text,
  );

I hope this helps.
Hopefully, overriding the escape methods will still be possible in the future ...

Best,
Olivier, @Paul-Ladyman

[domchristie]

Thanks @olih

I think the "aggressive" approach to escaping by default is probably the right way to go, with the option of overriding the behaviour using the public escape method. If you fancy putting a pull request together that'd be great, otherwise I will get something up as soon as I can.

Thanks again!

[olih]

Hi @domchristie

We are happy to give the pull request a try next week if that works for you.

Best

[yareeba]

Hi @domchristie,

We have been working on putting a pull request together. Could you grant me write access to the repository?

Thanks

[domchristie]

Are you able to fork to repo (to ayusaf1992/turndown)?

[yareeba]

done, thanks @domchristie

[domchristie]

Closed by #242