Extra asterisk, underscore, etc., from HTML when paste

Help
1

Sometimes when I copy and paste texts from a website (e.g: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/), a bold heading which is inside in html, will be pasted into Obsidian with the following format:

## ****heading name****

Is there documentation on how that conversion happens and why are we getting 4 asterisk instead of 2? The same can happen with underscore, and even more weird for math or latex formats

  • Trying to see if this is a bug ?
  • or expected behavior that can be fixed with some kind of clipboard cleaner?
  • Or can we only fix it with custom Linter rules?

Thank you!
2

Can’t you just use Ctrl + Shift + V to paste without formatting?

3

I would still like to keep the format so I don’t have to reapply it, I assume stripping the format would strip the heading and bold all together?

4

Yeah, pasting as plain text will strip all formatting.

For what it’s worth, copying from Safari or Arc and then pasting into Typora results in the same.

CleanShot 2025-05-04 at 12.12.37

1 Like
5

The site uses both bold and strong on the same element, so down to the site?

<b><strong>Python Tutorial</strong></b>
3 Likes
6

Yeah, that’s double-bad markup in HTML.

  • The combination of <b> and <strong> doesn’t make sense.
  • And I loathe seeing <b> or <strong> in headings. A simple <h2> is all the markup needed.

Obsidian translates the bad HTML correctly, even if the result is bad Markdown.

3 Likes
7

Yes that’s good to know.
I’m that case I’ll keep using this custom Linter rule I’ve setup with ChatGPT’s help to correct such incorrect formatting.
Thnx all!

2 Likes