Remark replaces double trailing spaces (simple line break) with a backslash

[ChrisRast]

Hello,
I use remark with remark-cli as a way to parse and correct my markdown files through a npm script.
The script in question simply runs remark {dir} -oq --rc-path {somePath}.

The .remarkrc file contains this:

{
	"plugins": [
		"remark-preset-lint-recommended",
		"remark-preset-lint-consistent",
		["remark-lint-list-item-content-indent", false]
	]
}

My issue is when I parse a .md file with double space as line-break, it adds a backslash \ instead.

Original file

Some text with a double space at the end.{space}{space}
Another line but not a clear new paragraph.

Is parsed to

Some text with a double space at the end.\
Another line but not a new paragraph.

For now, the only way to reproduce that outside the cli, is to use atom-beautify and in the Markdown beautification, tick the "Commonmark" option.

Any idea why this happens, and how to avoid it?

Thank you.

[wooorm]

That’s because to invisible spaces at the end of a line is a pretty bad design decision, and common mark came with a fix! If you end a line with a slash, it does the same.

So, if you specify that you want to use common mark, it’ll use the smarter, commonmark-compliant way.

Why would you want commonmark if you don’t want commonmark output? :)

[ChrisRast]

Okay, let's say that I decide to use the trailing backslash.

The other issue is that if I reparse the file, the code

Some text with a double space at the end.\
Another line but not a new paragraph.

becomes

Some text with a double space at the end.\\
Another line but not a new paragraph.

All I did was to run my script again, with the same parameters.

[wooorm]

Weird, I don’t this either. Maybe this is related to #250?

[wooorm]

In this example, commonmark-mode is not on, so, if you remove the solidus and use two spaces, the output won’t be changed.

In this non-commonmark-mode, if you use one slash, it’ll escape it (which doesn’t affect markdown). Note that if you run lint-md multiple times, no more slashes are added.

If you’d add the following to your .remarkrc:

    "settings": {
      "commonmark": true
    }

...and use one slash, it won’t change the amount of slashes.
And if you’d use two spaces then it’d transform it to a single slash.

Oh and finally, a) if you have a .remarkrc file, you don’t need to specify it: you can drop the --rc-path ./.remarkrc, and b) you don‘t need to install remark if you’re using remark-cli!