A way to mark plain-text and stop hugo from interpreting?

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2

What do you want Hugo to generate?

Since you’re using the {{< >}} syntax, Hugo will pass everything in the body through unmodified, as raw HTML.
So, the example you posted will (correctly) generate:

<pre class="prettyprint lang-html"> <pre class="prettyprint lang-{{ .Get 0 }}"> {{ .Inner }} </pre> </pre>

The inner <pre ... won’t be visible in a browser, since the browser interprets it (correctly) as a tag.

If you want <pre ... to be displayed in the browser, you can change your shortcode slightly:

<pre class="prettyprint lang-{{ .Get 0 }}"> {{ printf "%s" .Inner }} </pre>

.Inner is a template.HTML (a type), which basically means that Go’s template library won’t worry about escaping it. The printf "%s" .Inner transforms .Inner into a regular string, so the template library does escape it. (For the inverse, see safeHTML in the Hugo docs, under Templates > Functions)

The updated shortcode produces something like

<pre class="prettyprint lang-html"> 
&lt;pre class=&#34;prettyprint lang-{{ .Get 0 }}&#34;&gt; {{ .Inner }} &lt;/pre&gt; 
 </pre>

which is probably more what you wanted.

Other notes:

  • You may want to explore using fenced code blocks, which can indicate the language used. See “Fenced Code Blocks” on the Blackfriday page. They produce <pre><code class="language-html"> ... </code></pre>
  • If you want to talk about shortcodes, there’s a(n apparently undocumented) way to escape the shortcode processing: {{</* code */>}} will be passed through as {{< code >}} and will not be processed. See the source of the Hugo template function docs for example usage.
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