Markdown Discuss - Apr 2008 - buggy HTML from nested lists w/ paragraphs

I ran into a weird problem while writing my own little guide to  
Markdown (using Markdown, of course). The document is mostly made of  
list items in nested ul's. As I neared the end, I found (via  
MarsEdit's preview) that in place of two sections of content,  
Markdown had begun to generate gibberish strings like this:

	aa9ca05a7c006bc5e5c091c00aee0cd7

After weeding through different sections of my text to find an  
offending pattern (and even using TextWrangler to search for stray  
Unicode and the like), I found that it seems to result from a  
particular sequence, or type of sequence, involving headers, list  
items, and paragraphs, regardless of their content.

With all non-offending content weeded out, and 'text(n)' substituted  
for each line of actual content, I'm left with the text below, still  
generating the two errors. Each line of code has a blank line above  
it. Removing the blank lines or the final item, text13, is enough to  
kill either or both of the errors, while removal of other items kills  
one error or the other. (Removal of text8 kills neither, but I left  
it in case it's helpful for diagnosing the problem.)


# text1

   * text2

     * text3

     text4

## text5

   * text6

     * text7

   text8

## text9

   * text10

     * text11

     text12

     text13



The versions of Markdown I'm running this through are version 1.0.1  
of the Perl script from daringfireball, and whatever's included in  
MarsEdit 2.1.3(1404).

Any ideas?

On 6 Apr 2008, at 05:45, Tom Humiston wrote:
> I ran into a weird problem while writing my own little guide to  
> Markdown (using Markdown, of course). The document is mostly made  
> of list items in nested ul's. As I neared the end, I found (via  
> MarsEdit's preview) that in place of two sections of content,  
> Markdown had begun to generate gibberish strings like this:
>
> 	aa9ca05a7c006bc5e5c091c00aee0cd7
>
> After weeding through different sections of my text to find an  
> offending pattern (and even using TextWrangler to search for stray  
> Unicode and the like), I found that it seems to result from a  
> particular sequence, or type of sequence, involving headers, list  
> items, and paragraphs, regardless of their content.
>
> With all non-offending content weeded out, and 'text(n)'  
> substituted for each line of actual content, I'm left with the text  
> below, still generating the two errors. Each line of code has a  
> blank line above it. Removing the blank lines or the final item,  
> text13, is enough to kill either or both of the errors, while  
> removal of other items kills one error or the other. (Removal of  
> text8 kills neither, but I left it in case it's helpful for  
> diagnosing the problem.)
<snip>
> The versions of Markdown I'm running this through are version 1.0.1  
> of the Perl script from daringfireball, and whatever's included in  
> MarsEdit 2.1.3(1404).
>
> Any ideas?
Markdown 1.0.2b8 fixed this bug, as has Text::Markdown.

I'd recommend that you upgrade to one of these..

Various other implementations also get it right:

http://babelmark.bobtfish.net/?markdown=%23+text1%0D%0A%0D%0A++* 
+text2%0D%0A%0D%0A++++*+text3%0D%0A%0D%0A++++text4%0D%0A%0D%0A%23%23 
+text5%0D%0A%0D%0A++*+text6%0D%0A%0D%0A++++*+text7%0D%0A%0D%0A++text8% 
0D%0A%0D%0A%23%23+text9%0D%0A%0D%0A++*+text10%0D%0A%0D%0A++++*+text11% 
0D%0A%0D%0A++++text12%0D%0A%0D%0A++++text13

Cheers
Tom