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(I'm not sure I'm right on this meta site, but since there's a bug tag...)

The following is a link to a web page with a trailing ) in its URL:

test

I know, the parentheses can be escaped, but that's not the issue here.

It's markdown live preview looks like this (apart from the actual URL):

test)

I.e. the trailing ) of the URL is thought of as the close parenthesis of the markdown code.

Now, if everything goes as I remember, the finished post will have a link that looks like this:

test

Therefore, the server-side markdown parser behavior is different from the JS live preview.

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1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote accepted

There may be some minor discrepancies between the preview and the final post.

This one in particular is because the JavaScript regular expressions can't quite deal with recursive parens -- but the server-side can.

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Wouldn't it be more useful to reduce the server-side feature set then, to match the behaviors of both systems as good as possible? While this would require work-arounds to make these kinds of links work, at least the preview would prepare the user adequately for how the post turns out. – Daniel Beck♦ Dec 10 '10 at 19:29
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@daniel preview is like the viewfinder on your camera. It gives you a reasonable idea of how your photo will turn out but it's not pixel-exact. – Jeff Atwood♦ Dec 10 '10 at 22:04
Fortunately, you can make “free/test” edits for up to five minutes before questions and answers are locked in so that further edits trigger a revision (editing a comment always causes an edit icon to be added). – Synetech Feb 29 '12 at 3:44

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