How to create a custom rule to replace < and >?

[eddyg]

Greetings! I'm new to MarkdownIt, and it's working great, except I need to customize the output.

One of the things I need to do is escape < and > on the incoming unless it's a > at the beginning of a line for a blockquote (I haven't gotten that far yet).

So far I've been trying to get the escaping working using a rule like this:

def escape_greater_less_than(state: StateCore) -> None:
    for token in state.tokens:
        if token.type != "inline" or token.children is None:
            continue

        for child_token in token.children:
            if child_token.type == "text":
                child_token.content = re.sub(r"<", "&lt;", child_token.content)
                child_token.content = re.sub(r">", "&gt;", child_token.content)

by inserting it like this:

parser = MarkdownIt("commonmark", renderer_cls=CustomRenderer)
parser.core.ruler.push("escape-greater-less-than", escape_greater_less_than)

but it's not having any effect. Am I approaching this wrong?

Any suggestions? Thanks!