The problem#

In a recent post, I wanted to include a large code block of a log. In order to not make the reader scroll past that long block, I put it in a footnote. But triple-backtick (```) syntax for code blocks doesn't work in Python Markdown footnotes:

[^1]: Broken footnote, do not use:
    ```py
    print("Hello World!")
    ```

outputs the code block before the footnote, not inside it.

The solution#

For code blocks in footnotes, indent the code lines (and use ::: on the first line to specify the highlighting mode if desired). For example, the Markdown for the footnote in that post starts as follows:

[^full-journalctl-log]:
    The full log:

        :::text
        Aug 09 02:43:20 host systemd[1]: Starting unifi.service - unifi...
        Aug 09 02:43:20 host unifi-network-service-helper[2203]: grep: /var/lib/unifi/system.properties: Permission denied

The details#

The problem#

My previous blog post has a footnote in the first sentence. Due to the way footnotes are handled, the footnote reference is a link to #fn:prg, which works fine if the footnote is actually on the page, but on the blog main page (or any other listing of multiple articles) the footnote is not present because it's after the Read more… link. The result is that on those pages, all footnote references are broken links. These broken links should either be repaired such that they point to the article page or removed.

First attempt#

Unable to find an existing solution, I decided to write my own plugin, summary_footnotes. I started by finding another plugin, clean_summary that modifies summary and based my code off of it. That plugin uses Beautiful Soup to parse the summary and rewrite it. A quick look at the docs and I was able to figure out how to select the footnote links and rewrite them, which got me this version of the plugin.