"Insert Date" rendering may break when mixed with HTML

[hellekin]

Continuing the discussion from Date selector in Topic Timer:

@j.jaffeux

You can try to “insert date” in the composer gear icon

Problem

I tried to reproduce here, using multiple dates, and inserting code fences blocks, but it didn’t reproduce until
https://try.discourse.org/t/testing-insert-date-bug/1130/2 (this link will become obsolete by tomorrow, but it shows like the screenshot above.)

Cause

Finally I found the cause of the bug: the failing render follows an HTML tag with an attribute!

<abbr title="Coordinated Universal Time">UTC</abbr>

[date=2018-06-28 time=07:00 format=“HH:mm” timezones=“Europe/Brussels”] ![:arrow_right:](//cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/meta/original/3X/5/a/5aa33b89419423f0712cf1e6c72f0813cb3f082c.png) [date=2018-06-28 time=15:00 format=“HH:mm” timezones=“Europe/Brussels”]

fails to render:

UTC

07:00 15:00

Solution

Avoid using HTML tags in Markdown – Or maybe implement <abbr> in CommonMark.

I suppose that an HTML tag appearing in a previous paragraph should not affect rendering later on though.

In any case: when things fail, check for a mix of HTML and Markdown.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Why do you need to use an emoji arrow? Use →

[hellekin]

I simply pasted the result I got from using the ‘Insert Date’ button. The emoji transformation must be part of the cooking.

Edit: here is pasted the original character (or ➡ with backquotes)

Edit:

'➡'.unpack('U*')
=> [10145]

[j.jaffeux (Joffrey Jaffeux)]

Yes ➡ will be cooked as an emoji

I will give it a look to this tomorrow.

Test:

A

07:00

[j.jaffeux (Joffrey Jaffeux)]

This has actually nothing to do with insert-date. It’s a limitation of textPostProcess

For example it would fail with categories too, first one will work, ANYTHING AFTER abbr won’t (like my @sam mention) :

---

Contribute > Feature

<abbr>A</abbr>

A

Contribute > Feature

---

My understanding is that the next block after abbr will be transformed to a paragraph and not interpreted by textPostProcess. This is a behavior from our sanitizer https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/test/javascripts/lib/sanitizer-test.js.es6#L117:

@sam any idea on this please? Do you think it’s worth fixing? Seems like very very edge case in my book.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Something is not right internally cause <small> does not cause this issue nor does <sub> or <ins> or <kbd>

I am guessing this is something internally is broken in sanitizer that is specific to this inline tag. Probably worth fixing.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

OK this was an <abbr> and all other tags that start with <a specific bug.

Fixed per:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/b54ba4c952d79d56742e76081d692f1281e88512