Rule - MD026#

Property	Value
Aliases	`md026`, `no-trailing-punctuation`
Autofix Available	No
Enabled By Default	Yes

Summary#

Trailing punctuation present in heading text.

Reasoning#

Readability#

Headings are meant to be the titles for each distinct section of the document and are rarely meant to be complete sentences. Except for the question mark character (?), which is often used for a section title that asks a question, no other sentence ending punctuation characters should be used.

Examples#

Failure Scenarios#

This rule triggers when a heading ends with a punctuation character that makes it look like a sentence:

# This is a heading.

Correct Scenarios#

This rule does not trigger when the heading does not end with one of the configured punctuation characters.

# This is a heading

# Is this is a heading?

Even though the semicolon character (;) is in the default list of punctuation characters, this rule does not trigger when that character is used as part of one of the entity references:

# This is a heading &copy;

# This is a heading &#169;

# This is a heading &#x000A9;

Fix Description#

The reason for not being able to auto-fix this rule is context. While our team considered simply removing any offending punctuation, the question we kept on asking ourselves is: what if the author of the document put it there for a reason? Without understanding the intended context of that punctuation and the proper classification of that punctuation, designing an algorithm that properly handles the punctuation is not possible.

Configuration#

Prefixes
`plugins.md026.`
`plugins.no-trailing-punctuation.`

Value Name	Type	Default	Description
`enabled`	`boolean`	`True`	Whether the Rule Plugin is enabled.
`punctuation`	`string`	`.,;:!。，；：！`	Punctuation characters that are considered sentence ending characters.

Origination of Rule#

This rule is largely inspired by the MarkdownLint rule MD026. and this article.

Differences From MarkdownLint Rule#

The main difference was that the original rule did not manage anything to do with multiple line SetExt Heading elements.