How to construct Sources in lua?

[CodeSandwich]

I'm trying to pass a file name to pandoc.read, so I don't need to manually open and read the file into a string. According to the docs pandoc.read accepts either the file content string or an unspecified Sources structure. In the custom reader docs I found that Sources is a table of structures, each with name being the filename and text being its content. I tried constructing Sources manually in a few different ways, but either the input file is ignored or I'm getting an Source expected, got table error. What's the right way to do it?

[tarleb]

There is currently no way to construct Sources items in Lua scripts. Pandoc passes a list of Sources to custom readers, so that the reader has access to the filenames and can access files separately if needed. The read function accepts Sources for convenience and for backwards compatibility, because pandoc used to pass only a single string at first.

We could think about adding a pandoc.Sources constructor, but I'm not sure if it would be worth the effort. The pandoc.mediabag.fetch function alreday provides a way to access a file's content with a single function call:

local mimetype, content = pandoc.mediabag.fetch(FILENAME)

Or, if one doesn't want to assign a variable, pandoc.read(select(2, pandoc.mediabag.fetch(FILENAME))).

[CodeSandwich]

Cool, thanks for the insight and the tips! That's a clever trick to use mediabag 👍