Rule - MD046

Property	Value
Aliases	md046, code-block-style
Autofix Available	Yes
Enabled By Default	Yes

Summary

Code block style.

Reasoning

Readability

One of the main keys to readability is to have consistent formatting applied throughout a group of documents. It therefore follows that setting consistent guidelines for code block usage within a document or within an organization will enhance the readability of any such Markdown documents.

Examples

Failure Scenarios

This rule triggers when there is inconsistent use of code block elements within the same document:

`MarkdownPython a=b ```

indented

````

With default configuration settings, the consistent style is used. This style sets the current configuration type to either indented or fenced based on the first code block encountered in the document.

Correct Scenarios

This rule does not trigger if the code blocks are consistently specified within the document:

`MarkdownPython a=b ```

Python b=c ````

Note that setting the style configuration item value to indented will cause the above Markdown document to trigger this rule, while a value of fenced or consistent will not cause this rule to trigger.

Fix Description

Setting the style configuration item value to either indented or fenced will cause all code blocks to be transformed into the specified value. If set to consistent, the first code block in the document will set the style for the rest of the document.

Note that the translation from fenced-to-indented code block and the translation from indented-to-fenced code block have their issues.

• For both translations, any whitespace before the code block is removed during the transition.
• When translating to a fenced code block, there is no guaranteed way to properly set the language for the fenced code block. As such, it is left blank and will cause Rule Md040 to be triggered when next scanned.
• When translating to an indented code block, there are parsing issues with an indented code block that immediately follows a paragraph. As indented code blocks cannot interrupt a paragraph block, an extra blank line is inserted between the paragraph and the new indented code block to allow the indented code block to be properly recognized.

Configuration

Prefixes
plugins.md046.
plugins.code-block-style.

Value Name	Type	Default	Description
enabled	boolean	True	Whether the Rule Plugin is enabled.
style	string (see below)	consistent	Style of code blocks expected in the document.

Valid heading styles:

Style	Description
consistent	The first heading in the document specifies the style for the rest of the document.
fenced	Only fenced code blocks are to be used.
indented	Only indented code blocks are to be used.

Origination of Rule

This rule is largely inspired by the MarkdownLint rule MD046.