Add parenthesis as an accepted Markdown ordered list delimiter

Question

The Markdown editor knows that an empty line, followed by a number, followed by a period, followed by a space, is a list item.

1. This works great
2. It's almost magic

The problem is that I almost always use a close parenthesis for my lists. I think it's a pretty common practice, but the problem is that the editor / Markdown parser doesn't accept parenthesis as an acceptable list delimiter:

1. This fails horribly
2. This is on the next line I swear

Answer 1

It's transformed into HTML, and rendered by your browser. So even if 1)... 2)... were recognized, the output would still be

<ol>
<li>First item</li>
<li>Second item</li>
</ol>

...and the output would still be

1. First item
2. Second item

So the change would allow markup that other Markdown engines wouldn't recognize, and produce exactly the same output. You might as well just get used to the period.

Answer 2

It is not a bad idea, but too significant a deviation from the Markdown specification to be viable, IMO.

Answer 3

People might currently be using this to avoid an automatic list. So, no, please.

1) one
3) two
6) three

Answer 4

I have never seen anyone use parentheses to avoid a numbered list. It's always been the case that the author intends to create a numbered list of some kind.

Now, if HTML and CSS are incapable of producing a list with parentheses, then by all means use dots. But I'm getting a little tired of editing questions that use parentheses.

Answer 5

Parenthesis-delimited lists using 1) now work on Meta Stack Exchange:

1. We're switching to CommonMark

Answer 6

This is indeed an extremely useful feature. In fact it is not so much a question of convenience but much more about all the new users (likely unaware of proper markdown rules) that use parens for their enumerations, probably due to different cultural standards.

One of the biggest advantages of markdown is that it is so intuitive and that text written properly structured in its raw form usually works right out of the box when processed by markdown. It really happens very often that posts from new users with enumeration lists require an edit to be properly formatted simply because they used parens instead of dots. Implementing this alternative markdown syntax would thus highly reduce the necessity to reformat every feeled 2nd enumeration list.

Also note, that the recently developed CommonMark standard seems to support paren-style enumeration, too. But while there are existing requests for implementing this here, the possiblity and time frame of this implementation are still rather vague and implementing this extended enumeration style should be easier and faster than that (like the recently introduced possibility to start lists at numbers other than 1).

Answer 7

CommonMark allows for

1) parenthesis 2) delimited 3) ordered 4) lists

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https://commonmark.org/help/

Will CommonMark be adopted for SE?

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Answer 8

If you want to get an ordered list with parenthesis, you have to add a non-breaking space before each letter. In Mac, for example, you get a non-breaking space with option+space –it will appear a dot (.) in a red background.

So:

option+space a)

option+space b)

and so on..

As I said this works for Mac. For other languages see: How do I ensure that whitespace is preserved in Markdown?

Hope it helps!