Backslash prepended to the input [

[srmagura]

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

remark@14.0.2, strip-markdown@5.0.0

Link to runnable example

No response

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to the playground: http://remarkjs.github.io/strip-markdown/
2. Enter [

Expected behavior

The output is [.

Actual behavior

The output is \[.

I am not sure if this is intentional escaping or a bug.

I have a string of Markdown, and I want to convert it to plain text. With the current behavior, I will end up displaying backslashes that were not in the original text.

Runtime

Node v16

Package manager

yarn 2

OS

macOS

Build and bundle tools

Other (please specify in steps to reproduce)

[ChristianMurphy]

The escaping is intentional.
Some more context on a recent question asking the same thing: https://github.com/orgs/syntax-tree/discussions/87

Repeating some of that here:

Taking a step back, remark is an AST ecosystem.
Meaning it will preserve the structure/presentation of the content, but will not retain the exact characters.
You can read more about this is some previous discussions on AST vs CST.
https://github.com/remarkjs/remark/search?q=cst&type=issues and https://github.com/orgs/remarkjs/discussions?discussions_q=cst

In this case the escaped output is fine, it doesn't matter if it is escaped, the final presentation will be the same.

Adding on some additional context, if you are looking for full plain text rather than stripped down markdown text.
Consider using https://github.com/syntax-tree/mdast-util-to-string rather than remark-stringify to generate plain text rather than markdown text.

[srmagura]

Thanks @ChristianMurphy! mdast-util-to-string is doing exactly what I needed:

const tree = fromMarkdown(markdown);
return toString(tree);