Question: When German quotation marks („ and “ or HTML code `&bdquo;` and `&ldquo;`, see <https://unicode-table.com/de/201E/> and <https://unicode-table.com/de/201C/>) are in between bold text markers `**...**`, then pandoc does not render the text bold when I knit in RStudio. Even worse, the `**`s are printed verbatim in the HTML document.

Example:

```
---
output: html_document
lang: de
---

This is a **„Test“**.

Another **&bdquo;Test&ldquo;**.

This **"just works"**.

```

Result:

[![German quotation marks break the bold text](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5cKA0.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5cKA0.png)

Are there any pandoc options or workarounds for solving this problem?

Note that a similar question was answered for PDF output in [r-markdown: German quotation marks](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48427353/r-markdown-german-quotation-marks). But I need HTML output.

Answer: 
The issue tracking input of localized quotes is <https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/661>.

Meanwhile, I recommend using non-typographic quotes (`"`) and for HTML-output use the `--html-q-tags` option and [some CSS, like](https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/CSS/quotes):

```
q {
  quotes: '„' '“';
}

```
My workaround: I made use of the command line tool `sed` and regular expressions:

First, modify the .Rmd (or .md) file and replace all the German typographic quotation marks with standard quotation marks: (WARNING: commands change the file inplace!)

```
sed -i 's/„/"/g' mydocument.Rmd
sed -i 's/“/"/g' mydocument.Rmd

```

Knit the document (or convert it to HTML with pandoc).

Then, replace all the English typographic quotation marks with German ones:

```
sed -i "s/“/„/g" mydocument.html
sed -i "s/”/“/g" mydocument.html

```