Possible to treat a _single_ internal link as external?

[minrk]

Short summary: I want to link to an anchor on an internal page that I know will be there, but myst can't reasonably know will be there. I believe myst_all_links_external=True would work for this, but I don't want to do that for all links, just this one.

Essentially, I want to emit this link.

More detail:

I have a page where some of the content is loaded via javascript (openapi), so the anchors are available to myst.

I want to create a link to this page, with an anchor that myst doesn't know about, and let myst 'trust me' that the link will resolve. I've tried e.g.

[md](./rest-api.md#/default/get_users)
[html](./rest-api.html#/default/get_users)

and it fails with

WARNING: 'myst' reference target not found: ./rest-api.html#/default/get_users

I'd be happy with the warning (makes sense, myst doesn't know about it!) if it still created the warned-about link, but because the target doesn't resolve, no link is added.

Is there a way without enabling all external link handling to get one unresolved anchor link to work?

[lesteve]

I had a similar use case in pyodide/pyodide#3244 (comment), glad to see I am not the only one!

I naively thought using HTML directly would fix it but this doesn't work, probably because MyST is parsing HTML in a clever way.

<a href="../console.html">attempt with external</a>

Adding the external class makes it work e.g. but I am not sure how robust this is (I also used class reference because this is what is used for links in the generated HTML but I don't think this is crucial):

<a class="reference external" href="../console.html">attempt with external</a>

In our case we ended ups using the eval-rst directive and write the link in rST. This is cumbersome but we thought this was the most robust solution:

[chrisjsewell]

Heya @minrk see https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/stable/syntax/cross-referencing.html#customising-external-url-resolution

you can now use [my-external-link](my-external-link){.external}

[minrk]

Thanks, that works!