Importing A Word Document: How to Convert Square Brackets

Rodger Vitkens January 19, 2017

When importing a Word document, how can you convert square brackets ([]) literally? That is, not to have it expand as a link? The normal techniques for the editor do not seem to work.

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Rodger Vitkens January 23, 2017

Thanks for the reply! I tried that and it has seemingly inconsistent results. The escape ([afda]) below expands, the second one ([asda]) doesn't. It also seems to add carriage returns where it wants to. What am I missing?

 

EscapeTest.PNG

Rob Woodgate
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January 24, 2017

Hi Rodger,

That's interesting, the first escape character has been ignored, then the escape characters in the H2 section have been treated as a carriage return. I'm not sure why.

I've not had to escape square brackets so I've not investigated their treatment in any great depth.  If you need a definitive answer then in the absence of anyone else commenting here you might be best off asking Atlassian directly.

However, if you just want it to work, you've got the option of doing a global search and replace in your Word document to change a left square bracket to an unused character (e.g. a pipe) and then do a search and replace in Confluence after the import to get the left square bracket back.  It's a bit clunky, but if you're just concerned about being able to get the import done then that would probably be the easiest way.

 

Rodger Vitkens January 26, 2017

Thanks for the reply and the workaround.

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Rob Woodgate
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January 22, 2017

Hi Rodger,

The standard escape character for Word imports is a back slack: \

I haven't tried it with square brackets, but \[] should render as \[], not as a link.

You'll have to remove the slash in Confluence after you've imported (unless you want to keep it/don't mind it being on the page).

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