Text in <pre> lost when converting <table> in markdown to other formats

[mohd-akram]

Explain the problem.
Text inside <pre> tags in a markdown <table> seems to be lost when converting the file to other formats.

To reproduce, create table.md:

<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>first column</td>
      <td><pre>second column</pre></td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Run pandoc -t plain table.md.

Expected output:

first column
second column

Actual output:

first column

Removing the <pre> tags or using other tags results in the correct output.

Pandoc version?
3.1.11

[jgm]

This is all expected behavior.
You can see how pandoc parses this by doing pandoc -f markdown -t native:

% pandoc -f markdown -t native
<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>first column</td>
      <td><pre>second column</pre></td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
^D
[ RawBlock (Format "html") "<table>"
, RawBlock (Format "html") "<tbody>"
, RawBlock (Format "html") "<tr>"
, RawBlock (Format "html") "<td>"
, Plain [ Str "first" , Space , Str "column" ]
, RawBlock (Format "html") "</td>"
, RawBlock (Format "html") "<td>"
, RawBlock (Format "html") "<pre>second column</pre>"
, RawBlock (Format "html") "</td>"
, RawBlock (Format "html") "</tr>"
, RawBlock (Format "html") "</tbody>"
, RawBlock (Format "html") "</table>"
]

When you are producing fomats other than html, all the raw HTML blocks will be ignored. So the only thing that will come out are the contents of HTML elements, other than verbatim ones like <pre>.
See the docs on markdown_in_raw_html_blocks.

I think those docs should be amended slightly, adding pre to style, script, and textarea.

[mohd-akram]

Thanks for updating the docs (and for the -t native tip). Can I ask why <pre> is included in this list? Is it because it has no direct mapping in pandoc? I see there's a CodeBlock but that seems to imply <pre><code>.

[jgm]

Because the contents of pre are meant to be verbatim text and hence shhould not be interpreted as markdown.

[jgm]

See also #2716.