Re: [O] Bug: can't use square brackets in link descriptions;

[Christian Moe]

Hi,

One way to solve it would be with org entities. I don't think they 
exist for square brackets, but you could make a user-defined one.

You could put something like this in your .emacs (I think plain 
bracket characters should work in every export format, so I haven't 
bothered to look up HTML entities or LaTeX commands):

(setq org-entities-user
      '(("lbr" "[" nil "[" "[" "[" "[") ; left square bracket
        ("rbr" "]" nil "]" "]" "]" "]"))) ; right square bracket

Then try the following -- ugly as sin, and as painful as XML entities, 
but it gives the output you want in whatever format:

  Here is a [[http://foobar.org][foo \lbr{}bar\rbr{}]]

The curly bracket replacement (which I think is very reasonable, 
really) is currently hardcoded in org-make-link-string. If it were 
made customizable, that would take the pain (but not the ugliness) out 
of making links like the above.

A backslash escape would have been nice to have, but \[...\] is 
already interpreted as a math environment.

Yours,
Christian


On 1/31/12 5:19 PM, Christoph LANGE wrote:
> Dear org-mode developers,
>
> I am desperately trying to get a square bracket into the description
> of a link.
>
> That is, in an org file that I want to export to HTML, I would like to
> have the source
>
> <a href="http://example.org";>foo [bar]</a>
>
> and of course I would like to avoid using XML character entities such
> as &#5b; for [, for two reasons:
>
> 1. It is painful.
> 2. I might eventually want to export my org file to some other format
> than HTML.
>
> I noticed this post on escaping in org links
> (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/37888), but apparently I
> didn't understand it.
>
> I thought that escaping as %5B might work – not only in the "link"
> component of a link, where it works due to the specification of URIs,
> but also in the "description" component, but in the description it
> doesn't work.
>
> Quite generally, I wonder whether there is (or, why there is not) a
> generic escape character (e.g. the backslash), which would also allow
> for escaping other characters of the org markup syntax, such as * or /.
>
> So far this was something like a feature request, but there is also
> one actual bug:
>
> When I insert or edit a link with org-insert-link (C-c C-l) and insert
> square brackets into the link description, they are rewritten to
> {...}, which I do not consider acceptable. If there is any escape
> syntax, they should rather be rewritten using that escape syntax.
>
> Thanks in advance for any pointers,
>
> Christoph