Remark plugin is un-escaping content

[lopenchi]

Initial checklist

• I read the support docs
• I read the contributing guide
• I agree to follow the code of conduct
• I searched issues and couldn’t find anything (or linked relevant results below)

Affected packages and versions

^12.0.0

Link to runnable example

Code Sandbox

Steps to reproduce

Reproducible example

import {remark} from 'remark'

const sourceMarkdown = "\{\{var\_name}}"


try {
  document.querySelector('#source')!.textContent = sourceMarkdown

  const file = await remark()
    // .use remark plugins here
    .process(sourceMarkdown)

  document.querySelector('#result')!.textContent = String(file)
  document.querySelector('#error')!.textContent = ''
} catch (error) {
  document.querySelector('#error')!.textContent = String(error)
}

Result removes the scape character for curly braces {, only maintain the one for underscore _.

It causes error in the mdx file

Expected behavior

Do not remove the scape character for curly braces

Actual behavior

Result removes the scape character for curly braces {, only maintain the one for underscore _.

It causes error in the mdx file

Runtime

Node v17

Package manager

npm 8

OS

macOS

Build and bundle tools

No response

[wooorm]

Hey! Yes. It’s useless. That’s intended.

We don’t track which things were originally escaped or not. So we can’t do that.

[ChristianMurphy]

Welcome @lopenchi! 👋
Sorry you ran into some confusion.

This behavior is intentional.
remark is a parser and formatter for CommonMark.
The escapes you add for MDX are not required nor recommended in CommonMark.

If you want to parse and format the MDX language, you can add support though remark-mdx (https://github.com/mdx-js/mdx/tree/main/packages/remark-mdx)

[matthias-ccri]

console.log('\{\{var\_name}}')
// > {{var_name}}

You didn't actually create a string containing backslashes.

In JavaScript strings, the \ character is treated as an escape character. In order to add a backslash to the string, you have to double up, like this:

console.log('\\{\\{var\\_name}}')
// > \{\{var\_name}}

Consider using eslint with the no-useless-escape rule.