rst and pypandoc

[alb]

Hi Steven,

Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
[]
> Since \r is an escape character, that will give you carriage return followed
> by "ef{fig:abc".
> 
> The solution to that is to either escape the backslash:
> 
> i = '\\ref{fig:abc}'
> 
> 
> or use a raw string:
> 
> i = r'\\ref{fig:abc}'

ok, maybe I wasn't clear from the very beginning, but searching for a 
solution is a journey that takes time and patience.

The worngly named variable i (as noted below), contains the *i*nput of 
my text which is supposed to be restructured text. The output is what 
pypandoc spits out after conversion:

i = "\\begin{tag}{%s}{%s}\n %s\n \\end{tag}" % (some, restructured, text)
o = pypandoc.convert(i, 'latex', format='rst')

Now if i contains some inline text, i.e. text I do not want to convert 
in any other format, I need my text to be formatted accordingly in order 
to inject some escape symbols in i.

Rst escapes with "\", but unfortunately python also uses "\" for escaping!

> 
> Oh, by the way, "i" is normally a terrible variable name for a string. Not
> only doesn't it explain what the variable is for, but there is a very
> strong convention in programming circles (not just Python, but hundreds of
> languages) that "i" is a generic variable name for an integer. Not a
> string.

I'm not in the position to argue about good practices, I simply found 
more appropriate to have i for input and o for output, considering they 
are used like this:

i = "some string"
o = pypandoc.convert(i, ...)
f.write(o)

with very little risk to cause misunderstanding.

> Can you show what you are doing? Escaping the backslash with another
> backslash does work:
> 
> py> for c in '\\ref':
> ...     print(c, ord(c))
> ...
> \ 92
> r 114
> e 101
> f 102
> 
> so either you are doing something wrong, or the error lies elsewhere.

As said above, the string is converted by pandoc first and then printed. 
At this point the escaping becomes tricky (at least to me).

In [17]: inp = '\\ref{fig:abc}'

In [18]: print pypandoc.convert(inp, 'latex', format='rst')
ref\{fig:abc\}

Al