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Option to define custom flanking/canOpen/canClose rules for delimiters

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@abhiramaab is already working on this.

Since Aug 12, 2026.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
java
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start with InlineParserImpl and trace how delimiter runs become DelimiterData and how processDelimiters invokes DelimitedProcessor.process(). Review the inlineParserFactory path and determine where custom canOpen/canClose or flanking behavior could be exposed without copying InlineParserImpl. Done means a consumer can define custom delimiter rules and the requested loose bold and italic syntax is parsed accordingly.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The markdown spec that I'm trying to parse has loose rules when it comes to bold and italic delimiters, i.e. *italic * is vaild syntax. These seem to be the rules:

  • _ - same behaviour as default
  • __ (as opener) - must have a space/punctuation on the left, but what's on the right doesn't matter
  • __ (as closer), *, ** - no rules (can be surrounded by anything, can have spaces on either side, and still work)

However, Commonmark-java follows the default markdown spec which is strict and has certain flanking rules. Currently these rules seem to be hardcoded in InlineParserImpl:

        boolean beforeIsPunctuation = before == Scanner.END || Characters.isPunctuationCodePoint(before);
        boolean beforeIsWhitespace = before == Scanner.END || Characters.isWhitespaceCodePoint(before);
        boolean afterIsPunctuation = after == Scanner.END || Characters.isPunctuationCodePoint(after);
        boolean afterIsWhitespace = after == Scanner.END || Characters.isWhitespaceCodePoint(after);

        boolean leftFlanking = !afterIsWhitespace &&
                (!afterIsPunctuation || beforeIsWhitespace || beforeIsPunctuation);
        boolean rightFlanking = !beforeIsWhitespace &&
                (!beforeIsPunctuation || afterIsWhitespace || afterIsPunctuation);
        boolean canOpen;
        boolean canClose;
        if (delimiterChar == '_') {
            canOpen = leftFlanking && (!rightFlanking || beforeIsPunctuation);
            canClose = rightFlanking && (!leftFlanking || afterIsPunctuation);
        } else {
            canOpen = leftFlanking && delimiterChar == delimiterProcessor.getOpeningCharacter();
            canClose = rightFlanking && delimiterChar == delimiterProcessor.getClosingCharacter();
        }

        return new DelimiterData(delimiters, canOpen, canClose);

As far as I understand this cannot be solved with custom DelimitedProcessors, for DelimitedProcessor.process() to be called, canOpen() (which is calculated in the code snippet above) must be true in processDelimiters(Delimiter):

...
if (opener.canOpen() && opener.delimiterChar == openingDelimiterChar) {
    potentialOpenerFound = true;
    usedDelims = delimiterProcessor.process(opener, closer);
    ...

So in other words I couldn't find an easy way to change this behaviour.

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like for it to be possible to somehow define custom flanking rules for certain delimiter runs. Maybe the part in InlineParserImpl responsible for calculating canOpen/canClose and constructing DelimiterData could be lifted into an interface of some kind, or a public method in InlineParserImpl so that it can be inherited from and the method overriden.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Copying InlineParserImpl over to my project and changing the relevant lines, then using it via inlineParserFactory when building a Parser

Dominant language
Java
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