Remove markdown wiki-link brackets during pandoc exports

remove_links.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from pandocfilters import toJSONFilter, Str
import re

def replace(key, value, format, meta):
    if key == 'Str':
        if '[[' in value:
            new_value = value.replace('[[', '')
            return Str(new_value)
        if ']]' in value:
            new_value = value.replace(']]', '')
            return Str(new_value)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    toJSONFilter(replace)

Thanks for the original filter code @maybemkl! I was hitting the same problem as @aravindk100 in that the filter would not find the closing ]] characters, so I modified the script to take advantage of some newer Python 3.8 features which also greatly simplifies the code. Here's my version:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from pandocfilters import toJSONFilter, Str
import re

def replace(key, value, format, meta):
    if key == 'Str':
        if match := re.search('\[\[(.+)\]\]',value,re.IGNORECASE):
           new_value = match.group(1)
           return Str(new_value)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    toJSONFilter(replace)

Thank you all, this is really helpful, especially when exporting linked notes from Obsidian through pandoc!

Apparently there seemed to be an invalid escape sequence. The regex pattern '\[\[(.+)\]\]' contains backslashes (\). In Python strings, \[ and \] could be misinterpreted as escape sequences. A raw string (r"") tells Python to ignore escape sequences, so \[ and \] are treated as literal brackets instead of escape sequences.

This is the improved version (with help of ChatGTP):

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from pandocfilters import toJSONFilter, Str
import re

def replace(key, value, format, meta):
    if key == 'Str':
        if match := re.search(r'\[\[(.+)\]\]', value, re.IGNORECASE):
            new_value = match.group(1)
            return Str(new_value)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    toJSONFilter(replace)