Markdown Discuss - Nov 2009 - A Suggestion for Strikethrough Syntax

All,

Hopefully, I'm not covering old territory, and a search of the list  
archives seems to indicate that I'm not. If I am, then I extend my  
apologies in advance.

I use strikethrough a lot so I modify my Movable Type Markdown module  
as shown below, right about line 1040 or so. I assume other Markdown  
implementations can use this change as well:

sub _DoItalicsAndBold {
    my $text = shift;

    # <strong> must go first:
    $text =~ s{ (\*\*|__) (?=\S) (.+?[*_]*) (?<=\S) \1 }
        {<strong>$2</strong>}gsx;

    $text =~ s{ (\*|_) (?=\S) (.+?) (?<=\S) \1 }
        {<em>$2</em>}gsx;

    # These lines added by Bill Eccles, 2008-07-04
    $text =~ s{ (\s) (-) (?=\S) (.+?) (?<=\S) (-) }
    {$1<strike>$3</strike>}gsx;

    return $text;
}

It converts

    -text to be struck through-

to

    <strike>text to be struck through</strike>.

Simple, and it works for me.

(I detail it at
<http://www.bill.eccles.net/bills_words/2008/07/a-test-entry-with-markdownstri.html
 >.)

Thoughts?

/Bill
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+++ Bill Eccles [Nov 04 09 18:06 ]:
>    All,
> 
>    Hopefully, I'm not covering old territory, and a search of the list
>    archives seems to indicate that I'm not. If I am, then I extend my
>    apologies in advance.
> 
>    It converts
> 
>       -text to be struck through-
> 
>    to
> 
>       <strike>text to be struck through</strike>.
> 
>    Simple, and it works for me.
Pandoc uses this syntax in its markdown extensions:

~~text to be struck through~~

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#strikeout

One advantage of this over your proposal is that it doesn't require
a leading space, which is useful for edits and occasionally other
things (e.g. when you want to strike out the first word of a text):

apol~~l~~ogies
syntactic~~al~~
~~Dear Colleagues:~~To whom it may concern:

It also allows e.g. hyphenated words in struck-through
text:

~~permutation-invariant~~

Now that it's been in pandoc for a while, I'd be reluctant
to change this syntax, but it now strikes me that something
like the following would look better:

apol(~l~)ogies
syntactic(~al~)
(~permutation-invariant~)

John

> Pandoc uses this syntax in its markdown extensions:
> 
> ~~text to be struck through~~
8< snip!
>
> Now that it's been in pandoc for a while, I'd be reluctant
> to change this syntax, but it now strikes me that something
> like the following would look better:
>
> apol(~l~)ogies
> syntactic(~al~)
> (~permutation-invariant~)
> 
> John
Actually, I like your double-tilde notation a lot better than my hyphen
notation. It accomplishes much better what John set out to do, namely make
something that looks like what it represents. And a tilde does look a lot like a
scribble, which is a lot like what a strikethrough represents.

I don't much care for the parenthesis-laden notation, though. Doesn't
quite look like what it represents as much as the double-tilde does.

I'd love to see Pandoc integrated with Movable Type. That'd be
sweeeeeeet.

/Bill