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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?
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
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><a </code> bar -> foo <a bar
foo <code><a </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.
[ \t]* seems inconsistent with the syntax guide's statement that "The backtick delimiters surrounding a code span may include spaces — one after the opening, one before the closing" (emphasis mine). Of course, even with the example in this question I still don't understand the use case that benefits from leaving extra spaces in, so the implementation makes more sense to me anyway.
Feb 27, 2012 at 7:40