Using underscores in links might lead to problems

[anatexis]

Just an observation, as this is a pandoc related issue and not something quarto can control.

When I put my twitter handle _anatexis_¹ in the navbar in _quarto.yml, it got rendered to https://twitter.com/anatexis (no underscores!). I found a work-around with this:

navbar:
    search: true
    right:
        (...)
      - icon: twitter
        href: 'https://twitter.com\_anatexis_'

the \ is translated to / and the underscores will be displayed. This just works because there is a slash before the underscore. So don't use underscores 🥲

Footnotes

1. I had to escape the underscores and put the link in a markdown link. [\_anatexis\_](https://twitter.com/_anatexis\_) otherwise it would have been rendered wrongly to https://twitter.com/_anatexis_ (second underscore gone in the link) ↩

[mcanouil]

Your URL is not valid anyway even for a browser.

This being said, the issue here is that the href value is parsed as markdown, i.e. "twitter.com/anatexis" (where "anatexis" is italicise), but because it makes no sense in "src" field of a link, the _ disappear.

[cderv]

I believe this is the same issue as

• '--' should be escaped in href to avoid en dash conversion #5503
• Citeproc warning when using a Mastodon profile link #3493

@dragonstyle we discussed about this is you recall. This is because of our markdown parsing when processing navbar item.
As we discussed last time, maybe href should really be ignore in that processing. What do you think ?

[mcanouil]

For the time being, here is a workaround for you to get the desired behaviour.

In _variables.yml:

twitter: "`https://twitter.com/_anatexis_`{=html}"

In _quarto.yml:

  navbar:
    right:
      - icon: twitter
        href: "{{< var twitter >}}"

[cderv]

As discussed the website part of YAML config is processed a bit differently than other other fields. We have a processing internally and it is possible that is uses the host to detect local vs remote href. By wrapping in raw syntax, you can't do the detection as if it were a string.

@dragonstyle know more about this pipeline for website envelope

[cscheid]

Well, this might work with my

website:
  navbar:
    left:
      - href: "`https://quarto.org/`{=asis}"
        text: Home

proposal. I have an implementation already, I'm going to start testing it.

EDIT: the asis inline doesn't solve the problem :(

[anatexis]

Thank you @mcanouil, that solves it for me!

[cscheid]

@anatexis here's a simpler solution:

website:
  navbar:
    left:
      - href: "https://twitter.com/`_anatexis_`{=html}"
        text: Home

The syntax is a bit ugly, but what's happening here is that we need to tell Pandoc to not process your underlines as Markdown (hence the backticks for a raw inline syntax), but we also need quarto to recognize the URL as a "real URL", and that happens as text, and is a check of the beginning of the string.

[mcanouil]

Of course, the code block could have been in the "middle" 🤦‍♂️