StackOverflow markdumb



  • Recently I've been frequenting the Python room on StackOverflow chat.

    In case you don't know, chat supports a markdown syntax similar to comments on the main site. Also in case you don't know, chat comments are automatically posted when you press Enter, but you can make multi-line comments pressing Shift+Enter.

    Earlier today, I learned (Through experience.) that markdown doesn't work in multi-line comments. WTF!

    My initial reaction was "That's silly". I was in a good mood then.



  • You're obviously "Doing it Wrong"


  • FoxDev

    Multiline comments are
    a barrier
    to
    reading



  • Yes. Chat and comments use a different flavour of Mn informally dubbed as "mini" mn. It only does links, backticks, bold, italic, code blocks and quote blocks. Newlines aren't supported.

    If you do write a multiline message in chat (and only chat), chat assumes you're pasting stuff from somewhere and disables all m******n parsing except for code and block quotes. A common gotcha here is that if you want this you must prepend all lines of your message with either a > or 4 spaces, including lines that would otherwise be blank. At least for code, you can hit Ctrl-K to get this effect.

    Another "quirk" of chat's minim******n is that you can force images to be embedded by prefixing a bare URL with an exclamation mark. Add in a special syntax for SE tags ([tag:whatever] and [meta-tag:whatever]), a few shortcuts (e.g. [SO]) and I believe that is all.


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