Stopping Pandoc from escaping urls when converting from markdown

Question

I have the following markdown:

[title]({{url}})

The {{url}} is needed for templating purposes later, after markdown is parsed to html.

Pandoc outputs:

<a href="%7B%7Burl%7D%7D">title</a>

but I need:

<a href="{{ur}}">title</a>

Is there an option in Pandoc to do so?

Answer 1

The URL encoding happens during the Markdown parsing step. We can revert it with the help of a Lua filter: Save the below to a file urldecode.lua and pass that file to pandoc via --lua-filter=urldecode.lua.

local hexchar = function(x)
  return string.char(tonumber(x, 16))
end

function Link (link)
  link.target = link.target:gsub('%%(%x%x)', hexchar)
  return link
end