Rule - MD042#

Property	Value
Aliases	`md042`, `no-empty-links`
Autofix Available	No
Enabled By Default	Yes

Summary#

No empty links.

Reasoning#

Correctness#

Empty URIs produce broken links that fail navigation for readers, including screen-reader users who rely on functional link targets.

Examples#

Failure Scenarios#

This rule triggers when the URI part of the link is empty or contains only whitespace characters:

[empty link]()
![empty image]()

Explanation: Both elements fail because the URI part () is completely empty — it contains no characters at all. The rule requires at least one non-whitespace character in the URI, and this applies equally to standard links and image links.

Unlike the previous example with a fully empty URI, this shows that URIs containing only a hash (#) are also treated as empty, applying to both regular links and image links:

[empty fragment link](#)
![empty fragment image](#)

Explanation: Both links fail because the URI fragment # contains no text after the hash. The rule requires non-whitespace content in the URI, even for fragments, and applies equally to standard links and image links.

Unlike the previous examples which had empty or hash-only URIs, this scenario demonstrates a URI containing only whitespace characters, which the rule also treats as empty:

[link with spaces](   )

Explanation: This link fails because the URI contains only whitespace characters (three spaces). The rule requires at least one non-whitespace character in the URI to be considered valid.

Correct Scenarios#

This rule does not trigger when any non-whitespace text is present within the URI part of the link:

[link](a)
![image](image.png)

Explanation: Both elements pass because each URI (a and image.png) contains non-whitespace content. The rule only checks for the presence of at least one non-whitespace character, not the validity of the URL, and this applies equally to standard links and image links.

Unlike the previous example which had a simple URI, this scenario demonstrates a fragment link with text after the hash character:

[fragment](#in-same-document)

Explanation: This link passes because the URI contains #in-same-document, which has non-whitespace text (in-same-document) after the hash. This satisfies the rule's requirement for content in the URI.

Unlike the previous example which used a relative path, this scenario shows an absolute external URL, the other common real-world destination:

[Python documentation](https://docs.python.org/3/)
![Python logo](https://www.python.org/static/img/python-logo.png)

Explanation: Both elements pass because their URIs contain non-whitespace content (full https:// URLs). The rule does not validate the URL — it only requires that the URI is not empty or whitespace-only — so any syntactically non-empty destination satisfies it.

Fix Description#

An empty link does not indicate a single correct destination. Without additional context from the author, choosing an appropriate replacement target is not reliably possible, so this rule is not auto-fixable.

Configuration#

Prefixes
`plugins.md042.`
`plugins.no-empty-links.`

Value Name	Type	Default	Description
`enabled`	`boolean`	`True`	Whether the Rule Plugin is enabled.

Origination of Rule#

This rule is largely inspired by the MarkdownLint rule MD042.

Differences From MarkdownLint Rule#

The difference between this rule and the original rule is that the original rule only fired on links, not image links. As the only difference between a link:

[fragment](#in-same-document)

and an image:

![fragment](#in-same-document)

is the ! character, it made sense for the implementation to respect both elements.