In Markdown, URLs in <…> have the period moved outside the link

[roryokane]

The symptoms

Try previewing a comment containing this markup (e.g. on this story):

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.>

What should be rendered:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.

What Lobsters renders:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.

The period at the end is moved outside of the link, breaking it. This is useful when autolinking, but not with explicit <…> links.

I can work around this by using […](…) syntax instead, duplicating the URL:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.).

The cause

The problem is probably this part in extras/markdowner.rb, labeled “fix links that got the trailing punctuation appended to move it outside the link”. I know the problem is after line 15, because I confirmed that RDiscount 2.1.7.1 (the version Lobsters uses) includes the period correctly when I try to parse <…> with RDiscount directly from irb, with the same arguments.

The fix

RDiscount still wrongly includes the punctuation in links like

I don't like http://example.com/prices. They are too expensive.

So you can’t just delete that punctuation-removal code.

To fix this bug, I think you have to run the filter before the Markdown is processed. In the filter, look for raw URLs in the text that are not part of a link (a harder task than just searching for <a> tags), and then explicitly wrap them with <…>s that exclude ending periods.

[jcs]

fixed by 6e6803f

[jcs]

fixed by 6e6803f