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Rule - MD037#

Property Value
Aliases md037, no-space-in-emphasis
Autofix Available Yes
Enabled By Default Yes

Summary#

Spaces inside emphasis markers.

Reasoning#

Correctness#

The primary reason for enabling this rule is to try and detect cases where the author probably meant to specify emphasis on a word or series of words. Most parsers will not detect emphasized text if there is whitespace on either side of the emphasis characters. Therefore, this rule check for cases where at least one of a pair of eligible emphasis characters are surrounded by whitespace characters.

Note that this rule does not currently manage cases of nested emphasis, such as *** for combining an italics emphasis with a bold emphasis.

Examples#

Failure Scenarios#

This rule triggers if matching emphasis characters occur within the same paragraph with Unicode whitespace around either of the emphasis characters. The obvious case is:

Markdown this is ** not some ** bold text

However, this rule also triggers if only one of the two ends has emphasis characters surrounding them, producing:

Markdown this is ** not some** bold text

and

Markdown this is **not some ** bold text

Correct Scenarios#

This rule does not trigger if there is no whitespace present on the inside of the emphasis.

Markdown this is **some** bold text

Fix Description#

Within the block of emphasized text, any leading and trailing whitespace is removed.

Configuration#

Prefixes
plugins.md037.
plugins.no-space-in-emphasis.
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 MD037.

Differences From MarkdownLint Rule#

The original rule did not distinguish between probable emphasis situations and emphasis sequences. Therefore, text such as this * is not * emphasis raised triggered on both the first and the second emphasis characters. This rule looks for scenarios where there are a matched pair of emphasis characters, instead of just looking for those individual characters.