inserting ascii pipe into an org-mode table

Question

I need to be able to have a table entry that looks like this

| ~Comonad~   | ~copoint~ | ~F[A]~ | | ~A~ |
| ~Semigroup~ | ~|+|~     |        | |     |

but org-mode insists on treating the pipes in |+| as columns.

I am aware that I can use vert as per https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11876048 and http://orgmode.org/manual/Special-symbols.html#Special-symbols but this doesn't work when it's in a code block.

What to do? I'm not keen on the UTF-8 pipe hack.

Answer 1

You could use a custom export filter (see http://orgmode.org/manual/Advanced-configuration.html) for replacing \vert in code blocks during export.

For example, for exporting to html, put this in your .emacs:

(require 'ox)
(defun my-code-filter-replace-pipes (text backend info)
  (when (org-export-derived-backend-p backend 'html)
    (replace-regexp-in-string "\\\\vert" "|" text)))
(add-to-list 'org-export-filter-code-functions 'my-code-filter-replace-pipes)

With this, ~\vert+\vert~ exports correctly to <code>|+|</code> in a table cell. If you use a different export backend, you have to adapt the arguments of replace-regexp-in-string.

You could make the code more sophisticated by reading the appropriate replacement for each backend from org-entities and org-entities-user.