Markdown code snippets don't allow trailing spaces

Question

I was answering a question on Stack Overflow and required to use a trailing space in one of my code snippets.

I formatted it like so:

`<a `

And it renders without the trailing space: <a

Using the <code> tag does account for trailing spaces, though in my case it busts because of the <. Here's my formatting with the <code> tag:

<code><a </code>

Here's how it renders: (Yes, you should see nothing there).

This is a pretty annoying bug. Can we get it fixed?

Answer 1

Is there some reason you can't just use the Unicode character U+00A0 (NO-BREAK SPACE) for that trailing space? It should work in comments too. To type the actual character on Windows, you can use the key combination ALT+0160.

Here's how it looks: <a 

Answer 2

Markdown strips leading and trailing whitespace in code spans:

http://code.google.com/p/pagedown/source/browse/Markdown.Converter.js#1011

http://code.google.com/p/markdownsharp/source/browse/MarkdownSharp/Markdown.cs#1358

The same is true for John Gruber's original Perl version. The comment before the function _DoCodeSpans also explains why:

#   *   You can use spaces to get literal backticks at the edges:
#     
#         ... type `` `bar` `` ...
#     

When you start a code span with, say, three backticks, you also have to end it with precisely three backticks. If the trailing whitespace was significant, it would be impossible to have a backtick at the end, since

```backtick: ````

is not a legal code span.

By the way, the reason that your <code><a </code> doesn't display anything is simple: It's broken HTML. You're opening an <a> tag, but you're not putting a closing angle bracket. So the sanitizer will remove the illegal HTML "tag" <a </code>, and then the tag balancer will remove the opening <code> tag, since it doesn't have a closing </code> anymore.

When you write your own HTML, Markdown won't do any encoding for you; you'l have to replace <a by <a yourself:

foo <code>&lt;a </code> bar -> foo <a bar

foo <code>&lt;a&nbsp;</code> bar -> foo <a  bar

Between the last two, note the tiny difference in whitespace after the code, resulting from the browser's whitespace condensing.