Re: [Python-markdown-discuss] Escape character and backtick bug.

[Blake W. <bw...@la...>]

Waylan Limberg wrote:
> Blake, this is an interesting approach I hadn't thought of and I like it .

Thanks!

> When we run through the unescape code,
> how do we know that it was an escaped character, not something
> intentionally typed by the author that should be left alone?
> Or is that why you also escape the `&`?

Yup, that's exactly why I escape the &.

> Either way, I was never particularly fond of the way markdown
> currently handles escaping. I think your solution is much more elegant
> and I'd prefer to use something very much like it.
> 
> However, I'm thinking that one of two things needs to happen:
> 
> 1. The escaping needs to happen at the inline pattern level (or at
> least right before/after them, perhaps in _handleInline), rather than
> on the entire document. That eliminates the need to worry about
> messing with code blocks and raw html.

Well, I think that escapes can happen (almost) anywhere, not just in 
inline patterns.  (Unless inline patterns handle everything except code 
blocks...)  Reading the documentation again, I'm not entirely sure why I 
believe that.  Perhaps confirmation from Mr. Gruber is in order.

Either way, though, I think that the other factor that kind of renders 
this moot is that any characters that get escaped will get unescaped on 
the way out, so it's as if we didn't do anything to them at all.  We're 
just hiding them from the internal processors.  And the internal 
processors can even pay attention to them if they want, since our 
mapping is consistent.  (If you see "&#x[0-9a-zA-Z]+;", you know it's an 
escaped character.  If you see "&", you know it was an &.)

> 2. Assuming the above concern is moot, the escaping and unescaping
> should be pre and post processors respectively. Check the doc strings
> on the latest in svn (see below) for TextPreprocessor (line 413) and
> TextPostprocessor (line 945) which run on the entire document as a
> single string rather than split lines.

Yeah, I could see that.  Were the pre and post processors in 1.6 and I 
just missed them?  As a side note, I'm running against 1.6, because that 
was what got installed when I typed "easy_install markdown".  :)

> I appreciate all your hard work on this. However, it would be helpful
> if your diffs were against the latest in svn. There's been quite a few
> changes since 1.6.

Fair enough.  I'll see when I next have some free time, and give that a try.

> You can checkout from here:
>      svn co https://python-markdown.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/python-markdown
> python-markdown
> Which includes the test suite so you can check whether your breaking
> anything else.

Ah, I was wondering where that was...  Okay, I've got a copy in my 
python 2.5 installation, and all the tests pass, so I should be good to 
go with my modifications, I believe.

Thanks,
Blake.