Why should Jupyter magic commands be commented out in Markdown?

[lebigot]

Jupyter magic commands (like %%time) currently appear commented out in Markdown. The problem is that the rendered version (say in HTML in a web browser) looks different from the notebook, which is surprising.

I can understand that it is useful to comment these magic commands in the Python (.py) version, but is it really necessary to comment them out in the Markdown output? Can't the Markdown output be less surprising?

[mwouts]

Thanks @lebigot for reporting. May I ask how you render (R) Markdown files? I would have expected users to render .Rmd files with R -e "rmarkdown::render('notebook.Rmd')", which probably does not support Jupyter magics.

For now there's no global option to avoid escaping of magic commands ; if you'd like one we could discuss its specifications. Meanwhile you may find useful to add a #noescape comment on the same line as the magic.

[lebigot]

I was using MacDown, which displays Markdown. As I am not an R user, and since I do not want to install R on my machine just for visualizing something that looks quite standard, this looked like a reasonable approach. :)

Maybe the problem comes from the fact that I was expecting R Markdown to be essentially the same as Markdown, with maybe some distinct meta-data in the header (a quick search didn't yield anything)? In a .md version of a notebook, I would expect the %%magic commands to be displayed just like in the Jupyter notebook.

[mwouts]

@lebigot , the package now offers support for plain markdown documents, cf. #44 . I close this issue, but feedback is welcome !