CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlmarkdownpandoc
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Reputation: 107

PanDoc: How to assign level-one Atx-style header (markdown) to the contents of html title tag

I am using PanDoc to convert a large number of markdown (.md) files to html. I'm using the following Windows command-line:

for %%i in (*.md) do pandoc -f markdown -s %%~ni.md > html/%%~ni.html

On a test run, the html looks OK, except for the title tag - it's empty. Here is an example of the beginning of the .md file:

#Topic Title
- [Anchor 1](#anchor1)
- [Anchor 2](#anchor2)
<a name="anchor1"></a>
## Anchor 1

Is there a way I can tell PanDoc to parse the

#Topic Title

so that, in the html output files, I will get:

<title>Topic Title</title>

?

There are other .md tags I'd like to parse, and I think solving this will help me solve the rest of it.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 968

Answers (1)

Waylan
Waylan

Reputation: 42497

I don't believe Pandoc supports this out-of-the-box. The relevant part of the Pandoc documentation states:

Templates may contain variables. Variable names are sequences of alphanumerics, -, and _, starting with a letter. A variable name surrounded by $ signs will be replaced by its value. For example, the string $title$ in

<title>$title$</title>

will be replaced by the document title.

It then continues:

Some variables are set automatically by pandoc. These vary somewhat depending on the output format, but include metadata fields (such as title, author, and date) as well as the following:

And proceeds to list a bunch of variables (none of which are relevant to your question). However, the above quote indicates that the title variable is a metadata field. The metadata field can be defined in a pandoc_title_block, a yaml_metadata_block, or passed in as a command line option.

The docs note that:

... you may also keep the metadata in a separate YAML file and pass it to pandoc as an argument, along with your markdown files ...

So you have a couple options:

  1. Edit each document to add metadata defining the title for each document (this could possibly be scripted).
  2. Write your script to extract the title (perhaps a regex which looks for #header in the first line) and passes that in to Pandoc as a command line option.

If you intend to start including the metadata in new documents you create going forward, then the first option is probably the way to go. Run a script once to batch edit your documents and then your done. However, if you have no intention of adding metadata to any documents, I would consider the second option. You are already running a loop, so just get the title before calling Pandoc within your loop (although I'm not sure how to do that in a windows script).

Upvotes: 1

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