Special chararacters in textile

The following HTML should be converted to textile:

**** Ressourcen schonen, weniger drucken - Think before you print! ****

As far as I can see, this is valid HTML.

Converting this to Textile with pandoc via

pandoc -f html -t textile filename.html

the output for this piece is encoded like this:

&#42;&#42;&#42;&#42; Ressourcen schonen, weniger drucken - Think before you print! &#42;&#42;&#42;&#42;

This looks to be valid Textile, according to some sites which happily decode it. Other sites however, complain that this is not valid:

Your text appears to contain something that shouldn’t be pasted into our textile form.

Also, pandoc reverse transformation of the output in Textile format returns this:

&amp;#42;&amp;#42;&amp;#42;&amp;#42; Ressourcen schonen, weniger drucken - Think before you print! &amp;#42;&amp;#42;&amp;#42;&amp;#42;

Now the ampersands themselves are encoded, and it seems, pandoc doesn't see the output it generated itself to be valid input.

Is there a way around this? Is this really valid Textile?

Solution

Yes, it is valid Textile; according to the RedCloth 4 spec, inline HTML is allowed, and the dingus confirms it.

Pandoc converts the * to an entity when writing textile to ensure that literal asterisks don't accidentally trigger emphasis.

You've uncovered a bug in the pandoc textile reader, which should interpret * as a literal asterisk character. This should be reported on the pandoc bug tracker.