Bug: can't use square brackets in link descriptions;

[Christoph LANGE <ch.lange@jacobs-university.de>]

Dear org-mode developers,

I am desperately trying to get a square bracket into the description of 
a link.

That is, in an org file that I want to export to HTML, I would like to 
have the source

<a href="http://example.org">foo [bar]</a>

and of course I would like to avoid using XML character entities such as 
&#5b; for [, for two reasons:

1. It is painful.
2. I might eventually want to export my org file to some other format 
than HTML.

I noticed this post on escaping in org links 
(http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/37888), but apparently I 
didn't understand it.

I thought that escaping as %5B might work – not only in the "link" 
component of a link, where it works due to the specification of URIs, 
but also in the "description" component, but in the description it 
doesn't work.

Quite generally, I wonder whether there is (or, why there is not) a 
generic escape character (e.g. the backslash), which would also allow 
for escaping other characters of the org markup syntax, such as * or /.

So far this was something like a feature request, but there is also one 
actual bug:

When I insert or edit a link with org-insert-link (C-c C-l) and insert 
square brackets into the link description, they are rewritten to {...}, 
which I do not consider acceptable.  If there is any escape syntax, they 
should rather be rewritten using that escape syntax.

Thanks in advance for any pointers,

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Lange, http://www.facebook.com/ch.lange, Skype duke4701