Escaping of square brackets for reference-style links

[spier]

I am not sure if this is an issue on commonmarker, or rather https://github.com/github/cmark-gfm/issues. Or maybe no issue at all. So any input is appreciated.

I noticed that when I render markdown containing a link using the reference style, and then output that document as markdown, all square brackets get escaped.

Example with a regular link

(the square brackets don't get escaped)

doc = CommonMarker.render_doc("[foo](https://google.com)")
puts doc.to_commonmark

=>
[foo](https://google.com)

Example with a reference-style link

(the square brackets get escaped)

doc = CommonMarker.render_doc("[foo][bar]\n[bar]: https://google.com")
puts doc.to_commonmark

=>
\[foo\]\[bar\] \[bar\]: https://google.com

Is this the expected behavior?

[kivikakk]

Indeed, it is expected — try rendering to HTML and you'll see it spits out something very similar. Trying your document in the official CommonMark tester shows the same result: https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/?text=%5Bfoo%5D%5Bbar%5D%0A%5Bbar%5D%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com

The solution is to add an extra newline between the lines: references need to be in their own paragraph to be treated as such, otherwise it's read as part of the paragraph. Note that #to_commonmark will "normalise" the reference into a normal inline link.

[spier]

Oh interesting.

So I added one more newline as you said:

doc = CommonMarker.render_doc("[foo][bar]\n\n[bar]: https://google.com")
puts doc.to_commonmark

And the that returns:

[foo](https://google.com)

Also thanks for the commonmark tester at https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/, super handy!