Processing Markdown in Jekyll Post Titles

This’ll be a quick one.

My recent post on pigeons includes their scientific name Columba livia domestica in its title, and I wanted it to be italicized because that’s just how you format scientific names – so I needed to convinve Jekyll to parse Markdown in post titles.

Depending on your site’s architecture, you’ll need to change stuff in multiple places – in my case, it required changes in three spots:

• The post/page template, commonly found at _layouts/post.html. The usual way of outputting the title is {{ post.title | escape }}¹, which you’ll need to extend with the markdownify Liquid filter (converts Markdown-shaped input into HTML). But that introduces opening and closing <p> tags, so you need to strip them out again, yielding the following pipeline:

  {{ post.title | escape | markdownify | remove: '<p>' | remove: '</p>' }}
  

• The index page, commonly _layouts/home.html – you know, where you list all your posts. Same change required there.

• The <title> element. I didn’t want my Markdown to be displayed here, but there’s no built-in Liquid filter to strip Markdown – there is one to strip HTML, however; so:

  {{ page.title | escape | markdownify | strip_html }}