Conversion of special characters to entities

[Jelks Cabaniss]

Lasar Liepins wrote:
> Apparently MarkDown does not convert special characters that possess
> HTML entity equivalents. Examples are German Umlauts (ä becomes ä
> etc), which often come up in my documents, with me being German and
> all that. Of course I can do this with an additional script after or
> before running MarkDown over my documents, but since for example the
> ampersand is converted to &, I was wondering why such characters
> are not replaced by their respective entities.

You can use HTML [Tidy] for this.  Note that the default for Tidy is for
entire documents, though, not snippets.  Use the `show-body-only: yes`
option for snippets.

Piping your Markdown output to Tidy has the additional benefit of being able
to format ("pretty print") your HTML in many different ways.

/Jelks
(with subliminal suggestion for implicit link alias incorporated:)

[Tidy]: http://tidy.sf.net