CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitgithubmarkdown
David Callanan
David Callanan

Reputation: 5958

GitHub markdown not rendering and git detecting changes when no changes

There's a glitch that I've noticed in GitHub markdown, the VSCode markdown extension and other places too. It's behaving particularly unusually on GitHub and using git.

Very frequently when I type in headings such as # heading or ## sub-heading, the heading does not render correctly. Here is an example commit for a markdown file:

Source diff:

Rich diff:

As you can see, the rich diff isn't rendering correctly, and so isn't the file when I go into "browse files" (regardless of what computer/device I use):

Somehow, after deleting the space character after ### and re-typing it, there were changes to be committed. From my knowledge this shouldn't happen (because nothing has actually changed, I just re-typed the space character). But I committed it anyways and got the following diff:

As you can see the space character is highlighted. Now I magically get the following rich diff, which is now showing the heading:

And now, when I "browse files", the heading shows on every computer I use:

This is happening to my a lot, and I'm wondering why this is happening, how git is even able to commit no change, and if there is a way to solve this?

This is definitely not just me because others have mentioned this to me too in the past.

Note: My GitHub repo is private so I can't share a link, but it should be easy to reproduce.

Update

I opened the revision with the issue inside HxD and got the following hex output:

I then replaced the space character inside VSCode and got the following hex output:

There's an extra  character that is not shown in VSCode and that I didn't input. I've had this problem on both Windows and Mac OS.

Update 2

Both ascii and utf-8 define the character as  so I can't figure out why it's not showing up in VSCode or GitHub text editor.

I've also seen ascii defining it as the following on https://www.asciitable.com/

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4713

Answers (2)

Roberto Cannella
Roberto Cannella

Reputation: 11

Another cause may be an improperly named file or missing .md file extension.

Upvotes: -2

poke
poke

Reputation: 387517

The byte sequence 0xC2 0xA0 is the UTF-8 sequence of for the character U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE. So it is a non-breaking space character which explains why it is looking like a space in editors and shows up as a difference when compared to a simple space.

The fact that it shows up as  within the hex editor is simply because hex editors only ever display ASCII in the text representation since they only look at a single byte at a time. So they don’t look for character sequences like this which is required for UTF-8 to encode characters outside of the ASCII space.

As for why the non-breaking space breaks the Markdown parser, this is expected if the parser conforms to the CommonMark specification. According to it, the ATX headings are required to be followed by a space, where a space is explicitly defined to be a U+0020 SPACE character.

Upvotes: 5

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