Issues with pipes inside of backpacks inside a table

[skyzyx]

Actual Result:

This used to work as expected.

Parameter	Type	Description
id	`integer	null`
description	string	The description for the approval resource, if available.

Expected Result:

Parameter	Type	Description
id	integer|null	The identifier for the approval resource, if available.
description	string	The description for the approval resource, if available.

[kivikakk]

This is now intended behaviour — we revised the spec when it became apparent that there were some nasty edge cases with trying to correctly detect the pipe | outside a span (such as backticks) when there were multiple adjacent emphasis markers. You can see some of the history at #18, #19 and #21.

[Crissov]

This issue has been discussed in the Commonmark Discourse as well.

As a user, I almost always don't want vertical bars | to trump backticks ` – nothing should trump them and you cannot even backslash-escape anything else (including a backtick) within a backtick span \ `.
As a spec writer and implementer, I understand the benefits of clearly separating block and inline parsing. The question, though, is whether table cells are blocks or inlines.

[kivikakk]

👋 @Crissov

As a user, I didn't want that either — that's why I went to quite so much effort to make it work correctly. Like any developer, too, I wasn't really happy about throwing that away in #21 for this "solution", but unfortunately when confronted with situations like in #18, it turned out to be unsustainable; the edge cases get weirder and weirder, and trying to cover them up (#19) just makes for an even harder to explain system, the edge cases get even stranger, and the code starts to become a nightmare. (We ended up parsing inlines three times for each row there, iirc.)

Simply put, there's not a great, consistent way to do this. I think it does make sense to consider the table cell structure at the block level, inasmuch as they're not spanned by delimiters but rather separated by them. It's easiest to consider the entire table structure one large block which in parsed in its entirety, before inline parsing then happens, which is also literally the case.

[Crissov]

As I said, I understand it from a developer's POV. Anyway, wouldn't it work to parse for inline code spans ` (without linebreaks inside) first, then blocks and finally inlines? [No, may break code blocks with backticks inside.]