"proseWrap: always" breaks markdown links

[bschlenk]

Prettier 2.1.2
Playground link

--parser markdown
--prose-wrap always

Input:

Check out [this link]

[this link]: https://this-is-a-really-long-url-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com

Output:

Check out [this link]

[this link]:
  https://this-is-a-really-long-url-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com

Expected behavior:

I guess this is the currently expected behavior, but it breaks the markdown formatter my company uses - the link renders as a literal [this link], and you can still see the link text at the bottom of the document. Without the newline, the link renders as expected. I'd prefer not to disable proseWrap because I do prefer my markdown to wrap at 80 characters. But I wouldn't necessarily consider the links at the bottom to be a part of the "prose" of the document, so maybe they can be exempt from this setting and always format as one line?

[bschlenk]

It may be easier for me to fix the markdown renderer my company uses, but I'd like to bring up a few points of discussion first:

• the original PR mentions some public formatters (bitbucket) are also broken by this
• markdown definitions are technically not prose
• some people would like to enable proseWrap but not risk breaking markdown renderers
• markdown definitions are typically going to be something short inside the [], followed by something long
  • line breaking after something short feels like a waste of horizontal space and doesn't necessarily make what follows prettier or more readable (see example below)

[link]:
  https://my-website.com/this-is-a-really-long-url-that-causes-the-line-to-wrap

In this example, the extra newline feels messy to me, and only moves the link left 6 characters. A url that causes wrapping will most likely still go beyond 80 characters.

I see the value of this setting when a title is used after the link url. Perhaps a compromise would be to retain the current wrapping behavior when a title is used, but never add a line break when a title is not present, regardless of the proseWrap setting? That would allow someone who is fighting a fussy markdown renderer to keep proseWrap: always by remembering to omit titles in definitions.

I sort of see this being similar to the decision to special case mocha test strings on a single line, even when otherwise the rules would have them break.

Regardless of whether markdown renderers support new lines in definitions, I find it more pleasing to the eye to have the definition all on one line, as it makes scanning the definitions list much easier.

[pbrisbin]

Hi there- are there any plans to address (or discuss) this issue?

I'm the author of Restyled, which offers prettier-markdown automation on PRs as one of its "restylers", and I'm probably going to move it to an opt-in status, since it can't be trusted not to break links like this. I'd love to avoid that if this issue had any traction.

[rmartine-ias]

Commenting to express support for this as well -- besides breaking some rendering, I really do not like how it looks.

[JavierJF]

Hi there,

I was going to make a PR for this, but after reading the CONTRIBUTING guidelines, I have seen that there is a no-new options policy very clearly stated. But, since this is flagged as needs discussion, I will leave here a link to a branch I have with a fix for this. I will submit a PR in case discussion evolves here and I'm asked to.

[paddyroddy]

Have encountered this too. Seems to work for GitHub-flavoured markdown, but was deploying a Jekyll GitHub Pages site and hadn't spotted it had broken that!