Issue 176 - pandoc - only valid tags should stay in output, all other occurences of < and > should be transformed into character entities

Issue 176:	only valid tags should stay in output, all other occurences of < and > should be transformed into character entities
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Status:	WontFix
Owner:	----
Closed:	Nov 22
Type-Defect
Priority-Medium

Reported by janhdot, Nov 03, 2009

What steps will reproduce the problem?

input: a <valid_tag> and <not a valid tag>

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

expected: a <valid_tag> and &lt;not a valid tag&gt;

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

pandoc 1.2.1 on OSX

Please provide any additional information below.

only valid tags should be left in output, all other occurences of < or >
should be transformed into character entities.

Comment 1 by fiddlosopher, Nov 03, 2009

This is by design, though I'm not sure about the decision.

First, there's the issue of compatibility with other markdown parsers.
% Markdown.pl 
<bogus a b>hi</bogus>
<p><bogus a b>hi</bogus></p>

<bogus> isn't a valid HTML tag, but Markdown.pl has always been flexible about
allowing extensions.  So, for example, you might use an <eq> tag for equations,
postprocessing the output of pandoc with a tool like gladtex to convert these into
images.

So I haven't required tags to be valid xhtml tags.  This does occasionally lead to
undesired results, e.g. if you write something like '<this is text between angle
brackets>'.  So maybe this should be reconsidered.  (You can always write '&lt;this
is text between angle brackets>' if you really need this.)

Comment 2 by fiddlosopher, Nov 22, 2009

(No comment was entered for this change.)

Status: WontFix