Rule - MD038

Property	Value
Aliases	md038, no-space-in-code
Autofix Available	Yes*
Enabled By Default	Yes

Summary

Spaces inside code span elements.

Reasoning

Correctness

The primary reason for enabling this rule is that different parsers will interpret extra leading and trailing spaces in code spans differently. To ensure that the author's intent for the code span is respected, mismatched extra leading and trailing spaces trigger this rule.

Examples

Failure Scenarios

This rule triggers if there are unbalanced spaces at the start:

Markdown this is an ` invalid` code span

or the end:

Markdown this is an `invalid ` code span

of the code span text.

As a balanced pair of spaces at the start and the end of the code span text are automatically removed, this rule will trigger on multiple spaces at the start or end of the code span text:

Markdown this is an ` invalid ` code span

Correct Scenarios

This rule does not trigger if there are no spaces at the start and end of the code span text:

Markdown this is a `valid` code span

or if there are single spaces at both the start and the end of the code span text:

Markdown this is a ` valid ` code span

Because it is possible for a code span to have the backtick character (`) within its own bounds, a single space character is allowed before that backtick character to distinguish it from the code span boundary itself.

Markdown this is a `` `valid `` code span

Fix Description

Generally, a single space character will be removed from both the start of the code span text and from the end of the code span text. The one exception to that rule is if the character following (or proceeding) the space character is the ` character.

Configuration

Prefixes
plugins.md038.
plugins.no-space-in-code.

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 MD038.