PanDoc: How to assign level-one Atx-style header (markdown) to the contents of html title tag - html

Question

I am using PanDoc to convert a large number of markdown (.md) files to html. I'm using the following Windows command-line:
for %%i in (*.md) do pandoc -f markdown -s %%~ni.md > html/%%~ni.html
On a test run, the html looks OK, except for the title tag - it's empty. Here is an example of the beginning of the .md file:
#Topic Title
- [Anchor 1](#anchor1)
- [Anchor 2](#anchor2)
<a name="anchor1"></a>
## Anchor 1
Is there a way I can tell PanDoc to parse the
#Topic Title
so that, in the html output files, I will get:
<title>Topic Title</title>
?
There are other .md tags I'd like to parse, and I think solving this will help me solve the rest of it.

Answer 1

I don't believe Pandoc supports this out-of-the-box. The relevant part of the Pandoc documentation states:
Templates may contain variables. Variable names are sequences of alphanumerics, -, and _, starting with a letter. A variable name surrounded by $ signs will be replaced by its value. For example, the string $title$ in
<title>$title$</title>
will be replaced by the document title.
It then continues:
Some variables are set automatically by pandoc. These vary somewhat depending on the output format, but include metadata fields (such as title, author, and date) as well as the following:
And proceeds to list a bunch of variables (none of which are relevant to your question). However, the above quote indicates that the title variable is a metadata field. The metadata field can be defined in a pandoc_title_block, a yaml_metadata_block, or passed in as a command line option.
The docs note that:
... you may also keep the metadata in a separate YAML file and pass it to pandoc as an argument, along with your markdown files ...
So you have a couple options:
Edit each document to add metadata defining the title for each document (this could possibly be scripted).
Write your script to extract the title (perhaps a regex which looks for #header in the first line) and passes that in to Pandoc as a command line option.
If you intend to start including the metadata in new documents you create going forward, then the first option is probably the way to go. Run a script once to batch edit your documents and then your done. However, if you have no intention of adding metadata to any documents, I would consider the second option. You are already running a loop, so just get the title before calling Pandoc within your loop (although I'm not sure how to do that in a windows script).