Markdown footnotes surrounding a word result in superscript

[adunning]

Explain the problem.
Surrounding a word with footnotes in Markdown results in a superscript instead of the notes.

pandoc << EOT
^[note1]test^[note2]
EOT

Result:

<p><sup>[note1]test</sup>[note2]</p>

Pandoc version?
pandoc 3.1, macOS 13.2.1

[jgm]

^[note1]test^ happens to be pandoc markdown syntax for superscript. So there's a syntactic ambiguity here and pandoc is preferring the first match. This might be a case where you need to use a regular footnote, not the inline form.

[adunning]

This also occurs with two inline footnotes in a row:

pandoc << EOT
test^[note1]^[note2]
EOT

As you note, regular footnotes solve both cases:

pandoc << EOT
[^1]test[^2]

test[^1][^2]

[^1]: note1
[^2]: note2
EOT

Is there any case to be made for having the footnotes take precedence? The superscripts could still work with the square brackets escaped, test^\[note1\]^\[note2\].

[jgm]

Yes, it probably makes sense to make footnotes take precedence here.

[jgm]

The code has the following comment:

     '^'     -> superscript <|> inlineNote -- in this order bc ^[link](/foo)^

So apparently it was an intentional decision to give superscripts priority.

[jgm]

An alternative would be to say that an inline footnote can't be followed directly by a ( or [.

[chaojian-zhang]

There is some bug (rather than mere priority) component of this issue, as commented here: #5878 (comment)

When footnote contains words (with spaces), same problem happens.

Regular footnote is a pain to maintain when updating (e.g. inserting) footnotes, which requires updating all indices (or making up artificial names).

[rnwst]

See also #11054, which is a duplicate of this issue.