Apparently Lemmy turns my backslashes (used to escape round brackets inside a link) into forward slashes, leading to Lemmy users complaining:

Lemmy does not require the round bracket to be escaped in this case. Why it turns backslashes into forward slashes I have no idea, but it does so even when I try the same thing straight from a Lemmy instance.

Is escaping things with backslashes not common practice in Markdown?

I know there’s so many implementations of Markdown it’s hard to even speak of a Spec, but backslashes serve this purpose almost universally. On computers that is.

I sense an overarching narrative of Lemmy vs Piefed developing here. Or maybe a need for communication between all client developers, on how to implement things so they work across the fediverse.

Hmm, it does feel more like a Lemmy problem in this case.
Where could I raise awareness on the Lemmy side, short of opening an issue on their git repos?

  • A_norny_mousse@piefed.socialOPEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    TESTING

    Zollstock

    It works without escaping! Why did I even get into the habit? Must’ve been a problem months if not years ago. FWIW, escaping with backslashes characters that might otherwise have MD-specific meaning is common, normal even.

    Ignore it if you will, but converting them to forward slashes is just wrong.

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Yes. Pretty sure this isn’t the first complaint about the Markdown parsing. We’ve had some changes in the past. And I’m not even sure if this is well-defined. Some of Markdown is a bit weird. If I remember correctly, I’ve used software before which just uses the first closing bracket and cuts off the link there. And another question: What happens if a URL contains a mismatched amount of brackets? like https://palaver.p3x.de/test)page I don’t think that’d workpage)

      Edit: Yeah, that’s just wrong 😅

    • mschae@discuss.mschae23.deEnglish
      11·
      4 days ago

      I assume \ gets changed to / because they are supposed to be equivalent as directory separators? You know, Windows stuff. Either way, in a URI, you should use URI encoding to escape characters, not markdown escapes. So that’d be %28, not \(.