Is it possible to parse wikilink-style citekeys when exporting from markdown using the zotero lua filter?

[simonvanlierde]

Hello everyone!

I'm utilizing the Better Bibtex Zotero Lua Filter to convert citations from the [@citekey] format into live Zotero citations while exporting markdown files from Obsidian to Word via Pandoc. This setup works well for standard citations, but I'm struggling to adapt it for wikilink-style citations, specifically:

[[@citekey]] (double brackets)
[[@citekey | link-name]]

To address this, I attempted to preprocess these wikilinks with another Lua filter that converts them to a single-bracket format suitable for the Zotero filter:

function Inlines(inlines)
    local newInlines = {}
    for _, inline in ipairs(inlines) do
        if inline.t == 'Link' then
            local citekey = inline.target:match("^(@.+)$")
            table.insert(newInlines, "[" .. citekey .. "]")
        else
            table.insert(newInlines, inline)
        end
    end
    return newInlines
end

However, this approach does not result in them being recognized as live Zotero citations in the exported DOCX file—they simply appear as plain text within single brackets ([@citekey])

Does anyone have experience or suggestions on how to modify the Zotero Lua filter to recognize and convert these wikilink-style citations into live Zotero citations in Word documents? Any insights or guidance would be greatly appreciated!

[retorquere]

If you call pandoc --from=markdown --to=native source-doc.md, you get a dump of how pandoc parses your document. You will have to insert or modify Cite records, as that is what the BBT lua filter looks for.

[retorquere]

Something like this should get you started:

function Link(el)
  -- Check if the link is a wikilink-style citation
  if string.match(el.target, "^%[%[.*%]%]$") then
    -- Remove the brackets to get the citation key
    local citationKey = string.gsub(el.target, "%[%[(.*)%]%]", "%1")
    -- Create a new citation
    local citation = pandoc.Cite(
      {}, -- Mode (NormalCitation, AuthorInText, SuppressAuthor)
      {pandoc.Citation(citationKey, "NormalCitation", 0, 0, "")} -- Citations
    )
    -- Replace the link with the citation
    return citation
  end
  -- If it's not a wikilink-style citation, leave it unchanged
  return el
end

[simonvanlierde]

This was helpful, thank you!