name: np-kb-parsing-exported-markdown
description: Gotchas when parsing/ingesting Markdown that was EXPORTED from a rich editor (Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, Word→MD) rather than hand-written. Chiefly: the exporter backslash-escapes Markdown special chars, so a regex that matches before unescaping silently truncates names and collapses distinct entities. Use when writing a parser or ingestion adapter over human-authored .md docs (data-model docs, wiki exports, spec dumps) — especially if some tables/sections come out empty or duplicated.
Parsing exported Markdown (Google Docs / rich-editor exports)
Human-authored docs pulled from a rich editor are NOT clean Markdown. Before you
regex over them, account for how the exporter mangles the text — otherwise the
parser fails silently (empty/merged records, not an error).
The big one: backslash-escaped special chars
Google Docs (and similar) export a literal underscore as \_, and escape other
Markdown metacharacters too: \_ \* \. \- \( \) \[ \] \# \ ~ | { }. So a heading that reads tbl_v3_financial_billingPref` in the doc arrives as:
## <a id="_x"></a>tbl\_v3\_financial\_billingPref
A name regex like [A-Za-z0-9_]+ stops dead at the \. Two failure modes, both
silent:
- Truncation → entity collapse.
tblstaff\_application matches only
tblstaff. tblstaff, tblstaff_application, tblstaff_season all reduce to
one name and MERGE into a single node — distinct records vanish. (Real case:
178 apparent tables hid 245; ~67 were being merged away.)
- Empty records.
__Column: staff\_id__ won't match __Column: (\w+)__, so
a well-documented table parses with zero columns and looks "undocumented."
Fix: unescape each line before matching, at the very top of the parse loop:
_ESCAPE_RE = re.compile(r"\\([^0-9A-Za-z\s])")
for raw in lines:
line = _ESCAPE_RE.sub(r"\1", raw)
...
Only strip the backslash before a non-alphanumeric, non-space char (real
Markdown escaping); never touch \n, \t, or a legit \word.
Other rich-export gotchas
<a id="..."> anchor tags precede real heading text (## <a id="_x"></a>Name).
Strip them before reading the name.- Heterogeneous column formats in one corpus. Some sections use bullets
(
- __col__), others a Markdown table (| Column | Description |). Handle both;
when reading a table, skip the header row and the |---| separator, and strip
[brackets]/backticks from cell values.
- Prose masquerading as records. Single capitalized words ("Notes", "Season")
and ALL-CAPS lines get mis-captured as entities. Tighten the name regex to a
known prefix or multi-word PascalCase, not "any Capitalized word."
- Genuinely empty stubs exist too. After fixing the above, remaining empties
may be real: bare
## Name headings or "Details TBD." in the source. Verify
against the doc before blaming the parser — and don't backfill from a lossy
source; get columns from the authoritative system (e.g. live DB introspection).
Retrieving multi-tab Google Sheets via the Drive MCP
Before you can parse it you have to fetch it, and the Google Drive MCP has a trap:
read_file_content and download_file_content (CSV export) return only the
first (leftmost) sheet tab — regardless of which tab is "active" in the
browser. Making a tab active in the UI does not change what the API returns.
- To read a different tab: have the owner drag it to be the leftmost tab,
then re-read (or ask them to paste it).
read_file_content also samples/truncates large sheets (you get a partial
table). download_file_content (CSV) is complete but returns base64 — do
not hand-transcribe that base64 into a file to decode it; retyping kilobytes
of base64 silently corrupts the decode (Cyrillic look-alikes, dropped chars).
Prefer reordering tabs + read_file_content, or decode only if you can pipe the
exact bytes (never re-type them).
Discipline
Parser failures here are silent (Rule 8, [[np-kb-coding-rules]] — treat silent
failures as work). When a doc-sourced record looks wrong, diff the parser
output against the raw doc bytes rather than trusting either. Add a regression
test seeded with the escaped input, not clean Markdown. For source-to-sink
correctness when the parsed text later hits a query/template, see
[[np-kb-security-review]].
