Skip to content

figcaption is flattened to plain text: links and footnote refs inside captions are lost #369

Description

@Tigrandza

Summary

Inline markup inside <figcaption> is stripped during extraction. Links become bare text and footnote references lose their anchor, so a caption that cites a source in the original page cites nothing in the extracted output.

Body text in the same document keeps both, so the loss is specific to captions.

Reproduction

defuddle 0.19.2, node entry point + linkedom:

import { parseHTML } from 'linkedom';
import { Defuddle } from 'defuddle/node';

const fig =
  '<figure><img src="https://example.com/a.jpg" width="600" height="400">' +
  '<figcaption>In <a href="https://example.com/dijkstra">Dijkstra</a>\'s own words, ' +
  '"a formula is worth a thousand pictures."' +
  '<sup class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup></figcaption></figure>';
const filler = '<p>' + 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit sed do eiusmod tempor. '.repeat(30) + '</p>';

const { document } = parseHTML(`<!doctype html><html><head><title>T</title></head><body><article>${fig}${filler}</article></body></html>`);
const r = await Defuddle(document, 'https://example.com/a');
console.log(r.content.match(/<figcaption>[\s\S]*?<\/figcaption>/)[0]);

Actual

<figcaption>In Dijkstra 's own words, "a formula is worth a thousand pictures." [1]</figcaption>

Expected — same inline markup the body gets:

<figcaption>In <a href="https://example.com/dijkstra">Dijkstra</a>'s own words, "a formula is worth a thousand pictures."<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></figcaption>

Live page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula — the Dijkstra portrait caption cites reference 1 and links "A picture is worth a thousand words"; both are gone after extraction, leaving a dangling 1 at the end of the sentence.

Notes

  • The reference also misses the footnote standardization applied to <sup> refs in body text, so a reader cannot follow it even manually.
  • The Dijkstra 's spacing in the output is the separate inline-space injection issue filed alongside this one.

Activity

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions