Confusing `link-external-filter` example

[soxofaan]

What would you like to do?

Report an issue on quarto.org

Description

The example for the link-external-filter config is a bit confusing:

For example
^(?:http:|https:)\/\/www\.quarto\.org\/custom
will treat links that start with http://www.quarto.org as internal links

what is that custom doing in the example regex? Is that part of the regex (meaning that it has to be part of the link to be considered internal)? Or is that a special syntax for something?

[soxofaan]

comes from here I think:
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-web/blob/main/docs/output-formats/html-basics.qmd#L336-L340

and apparently mentioned here too:
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-web/blob/1d47eb81f05ec4b6c48864971a392ef677418eaa/docs/reference/formats/html.json#L444-L445

[cscheid]

I don't think this needs changing. The confusion can be solved by experimenting with the option, and understanding regexes are necessary to using them.

[soxofaan]

I guess I should have expressed this problem less vague.

There is a bug in the documentation, it currently says:

^(?:http:|https:)\/\/www\.quarto\.org\/custom
will treat links that start with http://www.quarto.org/ as internal links

Which is wrong: http://www.quarto.org/foo starts with http://www.quarto.org/ but it will not be caught by the regex

I guess the docs should be changed to

^(?:http:|https:)\/\/www\.quarto\.org\/
will treat links that start with http://www.quarto.org/ as internal links

or to

^(?:http:|https:)\/\/www\.quarto\.org\/custom
will treat links that start with http://www.quarto.org/custom as internal links

[cscheid]

I gotcha. Can you make a PR?

[mcanouil]

I made the PR:

• docs(html-basics.qmd): make description consistent with link-external-filter example code quarto-web#1332