Links with nested HTML or \n confuse the markdown converter

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript
Domain
tooling

Research direction

The issue names no files or tests. Start by reproducing the three HTML-link cases from the report in the markdown converter, then inspect the anchor-text matching and node textContent handling described there. Done means nested elements and line breaks in links produce the expected Markdown links, with regression coverage for the reported examples.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

A couple cases that generate the wrong markup.

1. nested html elements in link
<a href="http://example.com/"><span>foo</span></a> <a href="http://example.com/">bar</a> foo bar

gets converted to

[foo](http://example.com/) bar foo [bar](http://example.com/)

when I would expect

[foo](http://example.com/) [bar](http://example.com/) foo bar

What happens: the walker enters the a and then enters the span again, finding the same text twice. But the proper label text was already consumed, so it consumes until it finds another match. In some cases (like above) it even linkifies the wrong text.

2. line breaks in link
<a href="https://example.com/">foo
bar</a>

(notice the line break) gets converted to

foo bar

when I would expect

[foo bar](https://example.com/)

What happens: the node textContent is 'foo\nbar' which doesn't match any text in the plaintext.

2b. <br> in link

Another similar (but possibly harder to fix) case is

<a href="https://example.com/">foo<br>bar</a>

which like 2 doesn't create a link:

foo
bar

In general, since the code can't rely on the browser to properly deal with HTML content, some of these corner cases will probably keep popping up. But this happened in the real world (try copying and pasting the first news entry in the deprecated section here) and it seemed to be significant enough to report.

I will follow up with a PR that suggests potential fixes for 1 and 2 (but not 2b), but this is not my field so it might be far from good.

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
234
Forks
47
Avg merge
1d 12h
Merged PRs (30d)
5

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