HTML entities don't get any respect

[jidanni]

Why can't there be a third way?

$ echo '90°'|pandoc
<p>90°</p>
$ echo '90&deg;'|pandoc --ascii=true
<p>90&#xB0;</p>

Why isn't there a choice to just let the poor entity through unscathed?

And while we're at it, to make up for years of entity victimization, how
about a way to get pandoc to favor ° as the final output?

See also #844

[jgm]

There is a way:

`°`{=html}

The reason we prefer the numerical character references is that we aim to produce XML-compatible (polyglot) HTML, since this is required for EPUB v5.

[jidanni]

Hmm, nice workaround... but in the case of lots of entities, perhaps there could be a way to flip on {=html} for the entire file without needing the user to edit each spot in the file.

[badumont]

It should be easy to write a script that adds these tags to your file and passes the output to Pandoc, like: sed -E 's/(&#?[a-z0-9]+;)/`\1`{=html}/g' < myfile.md | pandoc