Markdown spec¶
Introduction¶
md_toc aimes to be as conformant as possible to each supported markdown parser. What follows is a list of parameters and rules used by md_toc to decide how to parse markdown files and to generate the table of contents.
Supported markdown parsers¶
cmark
:“CommonMark parsing and rendering library and program in C”.
commonmarker
:a “Ruby wrapper for libcmark (CommonMark parser)”.
as described on their website: “It also includes extensions to the CommonMark spec as documented in the GitHub Flavored Markdown spec, such as support for tables, strikethroughs, and autolinking.”. For this reason we assume that
commonmarker
is an alias ofgithub
.
github
:uses a forked version of
cmark
with some added extensions, called GitHub Flavored Markdown.there are subtle differences such as the disallowed raw HTML extension which affects md-toc.
gitlab
:uses
commonmarker
. Older versions of md_toc, prior to version3.0.0
, usegitlab
as an alias ofredcarpet
while newer versions usegithub
instead. In the past GitLab used Redcarpet as markdown parser.the extensions used in GitLab Flavored Markdown (not to be confused with GitHub Flavored Markdown) should not concern md_toc. For this reason we assume that
gitlab
is an alias ofgithub
.
Note
This last assertion needs to be confirmed thoroughly.
redcarpet
:“The safe Markdown parser, reloaded.”
Rules¶
Headers¶
Only ATX-style headings are supported in md_toc.
github
: the code used in md_toc is a reverse engineering of the behavour described in the following:The escape character
\
will be left as-is since they are parsed by Github’s markdown parser already:A line ending character is
U+000A
or theU+000D
character, respectively\n
and\r
. Everything following those characters is ignored. This has also the benefit to automatically remove the trailing newline or carriage return at the end of each line. This also includes ARX headers with line endings only as main content, such as#\n
or#\r
. See also:Every other rule for ATX headings is applied.
redcarpet
: this is the license used in md_toc:Copyright (c) 2009, Natacha Porté Copyright (c) 2015, Vicent Marti Copyright (c) 2018, Franco Masotti <franco.masotti@student.unife.it> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
List item rules¶
Problems¶
We are interested in sublists indentation rules for all types of lists, and integer overflows in case of ordered lists.
For ordered lists, we are not concerned about using 0
or negative numbers
as list markers so these cases will not be considered. Infact ordred lists
generated by md_toc will always start from 1
.
Talking about indentation rules, I need to mention that the user is responsible for generating a correct markdown list according to the parser’s rules. Let’s see this example:
# foo ## bar ### baz
no problem here because this is rendered by md_toc, using github
as parser,
with:
- [foo](#foo) - [bar](#bar) - [baz](#baz)
Now, let’s take the previous example and reverse the order of the lines:
### baz ## bar # foo
and this is what md_toc renders using github
:
- [baz](#baz) - [foo](#foo) - [bar](#bar)
while the user might expect this:
- [baz](#baz) - [foo](#foo) - [bar](#bar)
Indentation¶
github
: list indentation for sublists with this parser is based on the previous state, as stated in the GitHub Flavored Markdown document, at section 5.2:“The most important thing to notice is that the position of the text after the list marker determines how much indentation is needed in subsequent blocks in the list item. If the list marker takes up two spaces, and there are three spaces between the list marker and the next non-whitespace character, then blocks must be indented five spaces in order to fall under the list item.”
This is also true with the specular case: if our new list element needs less indentation than the one processed currently, we have to use the same number of indentation spaces used somewhere earlier in the list.
redcarpet
:The following C function returns the first non-whitespace character after the list marker. The value of
0
is returned if the input line is not a list element. List item rules are explained in the single line comments./* prefix_uli • returns unordered list item prefix */ static size_t prefix_uli(uint8_t *data, size_t size) { size_t i = 0; // There can be up to 3 whitespaces before the list marker. if (i < size && data[i] == ' ') i++; if (i < size && data[i] == ' ') i++; if (i < size && data[i] == ' ') i++; // The next non-whitespace character must be a list marker and // the character after the list marker must be a whitespace. if (i + 1 >= size || (data[i] != '*' && data[i] != '+' && data[i] != '-') || data[i + 1] != ' ') return 0; // Check that the next line is not a header // that uses the `-` or `=` characters as markers. if (is_next_headerline(data + i, size - i)) return 0; // Return the first non whitespace character after the list marker. return i + 2; }
As far as I can tell from the previous and other functions, on a new list block the 4 spaces indentation rule applies:
This means that anything that has more than 3 whitespaces is considered as sublist. The only exception seems to be for the first sublist in a list block, in which that case even a single whitespace counts as a sublist. The 4 spaces indentation rule appllies nontheless, so to keep things simple md_toc will always use 4 whitespaces for sublists. Apparently, ordered and unordered lists share the same proprieties.
Let’s see this example:
- I - am - foo stop - I - am - foo
This is how redcarpet renders it once you run
$ redcarpet
:<ul> <li>I <ul> <li>am <ul> <li>foo</li> </ul></li> </ul></li> </ul> <p>stop</p> <ul> <li>I <ul> <li>am <ul> <li>foo</li> </ul></li> </ul></li> </ul>
What follows is an extract of a C function in redcarpet that parses list items. I have added all the single line comments.
/* parse_listitem • parsing of a single list item */ /* assuming initial prefix is already removed */ static size_t parse_listitem(struct buf *ob, struct sd_markdown *rndr, uint8_t *data, size_t size, int *flags) { struct buf *work = 0, *inter = 0; size_t beg = 0, end, pre, sublist = 0, orgpre = 0, i; int in_empty = 0, has_inside_empty = 0, in_fence = 0; // This is the base case, usually of indentation 0 but it can be // from 0 to 3 spaces. If it was 4 spaces it would be a code // block. /* keeping track of the first indentation prefix */ while (orgpre < 3 && orgpre < size && data[orgpre] == ' ') orgpre++; // Get the first index of string after the list marker. Try both // ordered and unordered lists beg = prefix_uli(data, size); if (!beg) beg = prefix_oli(data, size); if (!beg) return 0; /* skipping to the beginning of the following line */ end = beg; while (end < size && data[end - 1] != '\n') end++; // Iterate line by line using the '\n' character as delimiter. /* process the following lines */ while (beg < size) { size_t has_next_uli = 0, has_next_oli = 0; // Go to the next line. end++; // Find the end of the line. while (end < size && data[end - 1] != '\n') end++; // Skip the next line if it is empty. /* process an empty line */ if (is_empty(data + beg, end - beg)) { in_empty = 1; beg = end; continue; } // Count up to 4 characters of indentation. // If we have 4 characters then it might be a sublist. // Note that this is an offset and does not point to an // index in the actual line string. /* calculating the indentation */ i = 0; while (i < 4 && beg + i < end && data[beg + i] == ' ') i++; pre = i; /* Only check for new list items if we are **not** inside * a fenced code block */ if (!in_fence) { has_next_uli = prefix_uli(data + beg + i, end - beg - i); has_next_oli = prefix_oli(data + beg + i, end - beg - i); } /* checking for ul/ol switch */ if (in_empty && ( ((*flags & MKD_LIST_ORDERED) && has_next_uli) || (!(*flags & MKD_LIST_ORDERED) && has_next_oli))){ *flags |= MKD_LI_END; break; /* the following item must have same list type */ } // Determine if we are dealing with: // - an empty line // - a new list item // - a sublist /* checking for a new item */ if ((has_next_uli && !is_hrule(data + beg + i, end - beg - i)) || has_next_oli) { if (in_empty) has_inside_empty = 1; // The next list item's indentation (pre) must be the same as // the previous one (orgpre), otherwise it might be a // sublist. if (pre == orgpre) /* the following item must have */ break; /* the same indentation */ // If the indentation does not match the previous one then // assume that it is a sublist. Check later whether it is // or not. if (!sublist) sublist = work->size; } /* joining only indented stuff after empty lines */ else if (in_empty && i < 4 && data[beg] != '\t') { *flags |= MKD_LI_END; break; } else if (in_empty) { // Add a line delimiter to the next line if it is missing. bufputc(work, '\n'); has_inside_empty = 1; } in_empty = 0; beg = end; } if (*flags & MKD_LI_BLOCK) { /* intermediate render of block li */ if (sublist && sublist < work->size) { parse_block(inter, rndr, work->data, sublist); parse_block(inter, rndr, work->data + sublist, work->size - sublist); } else parse_block(inter, rndr, work->data, work->size); }
According to the code,
parse_listitem
is called indirectly byparse_block
(viaparse_list
), butparse_block
is called directly byparse_listitem
so the code analysis is not trivial. For this reason I might be mistaken about the 4 spaces indentation rule.Here is an extract of the
parse_block
function with the calls toparse_list
:/* parse_block • parsing of one block, returning next uint8_t to parse */ static void parse_block(struct buf *ob, struct sd_markdown *rndr, uint8_t *data, size_t size) { while (beg < size) { else if (prefix_uli(txt_data, end)) beg += parse_list(ob, rndr, txt_data, end, 0); else if (prefix_oli(txt_data, end)) beg += parse_list(ob, rndr, txt_data, end, MKD_LIST_ORDERED); } }
Overflows¶
github
: ordered list markers cannot exceed99999999
according to the following. If that is the case then aGithubOverflowOrderedListMarker
exception is raised:redcarpet
: apparently there are no cases of ordered list marker overflows:
Notes on ordered lists¶
github
: ordered list markers may start with any integer (except special cases). any following number is ignored and subsequent numeration is progressive:However, when you try this in practice this is not always true: nested lists do not follow the specifications. See:
Markers cannot be negative:
redcarpet
: ordered lists do not use thestart
HTML attribute: any number is ignored and lists starts from 1. See:
Link label¶
If the user decides to generate the table of contents with the anchor links, then link label rules will be applied.
github
:If a line ends in 1 or more ‘' characters, this disrupts the anchor title. For example
- [xdmdmsdm\](#xdmdmsdm)
becomes<ul><li>[xdmdmsdm](#xdmdmsdm)</li></ul>
instead of<ul><li><a href="xdmdmsdm">xdmdmsdm\</a></li></ul>
. The workaround used in md_toc is to add a space character at the end of the string, so it becomes:<ul><li><a href="xdmdmsdm">xdmdmsdm\ </a></li></ul>
If the link label contains only whitespace characters a
GithubEmptyLinkLabel
exception is raised.If the number of characters inside the link label is over 999 a
GithubOverflowCharsLinkLabel
is raised.If the headers contains
[
or]
, these characters are treated with the following rules.According to a function in the source code, balanced square brackets do not work, however they do when interpeted by the web interface. It is however possible that they are supported within the
handle_close_bracket
function.https://github.com/github/cmark/blob/6b101e33ba1637e294076c46c69cd6a262c7539f/src/inlines.c#L881
https://github.com/github/cmark/blob/6b101e33ba1637e294076c46c69cd6a262c7539f/src/inlines.c#L994
Here is the original C function with some more comments added:
// Parse a link label. Returns 1 if successful. // Note: unescaped brackets are not allowed in labels. // The label begins with `[` and ends with the first `]` character // encountered. Backticks in labels do not start code spans. static int link_label(subject *subj, cmark_chunk *raw_label) { bufsize_t startpos = subj->pos; int length = 0; unsigned char c; // advance past [ // // Ignore the open link label identifier // peek_char simply returns the current char if we are // in range of the string, 0 otherwise. if (peek_char(subj) == '[') { advance(subj); } else { return 0; } while ((c = peek_char(subj)) && c != '[' && c != ']') { // If there is an escape and the next character is (for example) // '[' or ']' then, // ignore the loop conditions. // If there are nested balanced square brakets this loop ends. if (c == '\\') { advance(subj); length++; // Puntuation characters are the ones defined at: // https://github.github.com/gfm/#ascii-punctuation-character if (cmark_ispunct(peek_char(subj))) { advance(subj); length++; } } else { advance(subj); length++; } // MAX_LINK_LABEL_LENGTH is a constant defined at // https://github.com/github/cmark/blob/master/src/parser.h#L13 if (length > MAX_LINK_LABEL_LENGTH) { goto noMatch; } } // If the loop terminates when the current character is ']' then // everything between '[' and ']' is the link label... if (c == ']') { // match found *raw_label = cmark_chunk_dup(&subj->input, startpos + 1, subj->pos - (startpos + 1)); cmark_chunk_trim(raw_label); advance(subj); // advance past ] return 1; } // ...otherwise return error. // This label always get executed according to C rules. noMatch: subj->pos = startpos; // rewind return 0; }
For simpleness the escape
[
and]
rule is used.redcarpet
:Let’s inspect this loop:
/* looking for the matching closing bracket */ for (level = 1; i < size; i++) { if (data[i] == '\n') text_has_nl = 1; else if (data[i - 1] == '\\') continue; else if (data[i] == '[') level++; else if (data[i] == ']') { level--; if (level <= 0) break; } } if (i >= size) goto cleanup;
The cleanup label looks like this:
/* cleanup */ cleanup: rndr->work_bufs[BUFFER_SPAN].size = (int)org_work_size; return ret ? i : 0;
An example:
[test \](test \)
becomes[test ](test )
instead of<a href="test \">test \</a>
Infact, you can see that if the current character is
\\
then the the current iteration is skipped. If for any chance the next character is]
then the inline link closing parenthesis detection is ignored.i
becomes equal tosize
eventually and so we jump to thecleanup
label. That lable contains a return statement so that string is not treated as inline link anymore. A similar code is implemented also for detecting(
and)
. See:To solve this we use the same workaround used for
github
.
Anchor link types and behaviours¶
github
: a translated version of the Ruby algorithm is used in md_toc. The original one is repored here:I could not find the code directly responsable for the anchor link generation. See also:
https://githubengineering.com/a-formal-spec-for-github-markdown/
https://github.com/github/cmark/issues/65#issuecomment-343433978
This is the license used in md_toc:
Copyright (c) 2012 GitHub Inc. and Jerry Cheung Copyright (c) 2018, Franco Masotti <franco.masotti@student.unife.it> MIT License Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Apparently GitHub (and possibly others) filter HTML tags in the anchor links. This is an undocumented feature (?) so the
remove_html_tags
function was added to address this problem. Instead of designing an algorithm to detect HTML tags, regular expressions came in handy. All the rules present in https://spec.commonmark.org/0.28/#raw-html have been followed by the letter. Regular expressions are divided by type and are composed at the end by concatenating all the strings. For example:# Comment start. COS = '<!--' # Comment text. COT = '((?!>|->)(?:(?!--).))+(?!-).?' # Comment end. COE = '-->' # Comment. CO = COS + COT + COE
HTML tags are stripped using the
re.sub
replace function, for example:line = re.sub(CO, str(), line, flags=re.DOTALL)
GitHub added an extension in GFM to ignore certain HTML tags, valid at least from versions 0.27.1.gfm.3 to 0.29.0.gfm.0:
TO be able to have working anchor links emphasis must also be removed. At the moment the implementation of the removal is incomplete because of its complexity. See:
gitlab
: new rules have been written:redcarpet
: treats consecutive dash characters by tranforming them into a single dash character. A translated version of the C algorithm is used in md_toc. The original version is here:This is the license used in md_toc:
Copyright (c) 2009, Natacha Porté Copyright (c) 2015, Vicent Marti Copyright (c) 2018, Franco Masotti <franco.masotti@student.unife.it> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
See also:
Code fence¶
Code fences are sections of a markdown document where some parsers treat the
text within them as verbatim. Usually the purpose of these sections is to
display source code. Some programming languages use the character #
as a
way to comment a line in the code. For this reason md_toc needs to ignore code
fences in order not to treat the #
character as an ATX-style heading and thus
get parsed as an element of the TOC.
github
: the rules followed are the ones reported on the documentation:redcarpet
: needs to be implemented:
TOC marker¶
A TOC marker is a string that marks that the start and the end of the table of contents in a markdown file.
By default it was decided to use [](TOC)
as the default TOC marker because
it would result invisible in some markdown parsers. In other cases, however, such
as the one used by Gitea, that particular TOC marker was still visible. HTML
comments seem to be a better solution.
github
:redcarpet
:I cannot find the corresponding code, but I found this:
Other markdown parsers¶
If you have a look at https://www.w3.org/community/markdown/wiki/MarkdownImplementations you will see that there are a ton of different markdown parsers out there. Moreover, that list has not been updated in a while.
Markdown parsers have different behaviours regarding anchor links. Some of them implement them while others don’t; some act on the duplicate entry problem while others don’t; some strip consecutive dash characters while others don’t. And it’s not just about anchor links, as you have read before. For example:
Gitea apparently uses
goldmark
as markdown parser. This parser claims to be compliant: goldmark is compliant with CommonMark 0.29.. See:Gitea adds an annoying
user-content
substring in the TOC’s anchor links. This is true for versions (git tags):v1.13.7
v1.13.6
v1.13.5
v1.13.4
v1.13.3
v1.13.2
v1.13.1
v1.13.0
v1.12.6
v1.12.5
v1.12.4
v1.12.3
v1.12.2
v1.12.1
v1.11.8
v1.12.0
v1.11.8
v1.11.7
v1.11.6
v1.11.5
v1.11.4
v1.11.3
v1.11.2
v1.11.1
v1.11.0
See:
Older versions of Gitea used blackfriday. See:
Gogs, Marked, Notabug: Gogs uses marked as the markdown parser while NotABug.org is powered by a liberated version of gogs. Gitea, a fork of Gogs, probably uses a custom parser. See link below. Situation is unclear. Here are some links:
For this reason no implementation is available for the moment.
Kramdown: It is unclear if this feature is available. See:
Steps to add an unsupported markdown parser¶
Find the source code and/or documents.
Find the rules for each section, such as anchor link generation, title detection, etc… Rely more on the source code than on the documentation (if possible)
Add the relevant information on this page.
Write or adapt an algorithm for that section.
Write unit tests for it.
Add the new parser to the CLI interface.
Curiosities¶
GitLab added an extension called
Table of contents
to its Gitlab Flavored Mardown. See: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/markdown.html#table-of-contentsin March 2021 GitHub added an interactive TOC button on the readme files of repositories which works works for markdown and other systems.