Quoting bullets nested under numbers breaks formatting

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

When you use the quote button to quote a part of a post that has bullets nested under numbers, the nested bullets no longer indent correctly.

1. one
   - a
2. two
   - b

Try quoting this:

1. one
   • a
2. two
   • b

- one
  - a
- two
  - b

And then try quoting this:

• one
  • a
• two
  • b

---

The first one “breaks” when it is quoted, with improper indentation.

Before quote:

After quote:

Notably, to get things to indent correctly in the first place, the bullets underneath numbers require three leading spaces. The bullets underneath bullets only require two leading spaces. When quoting, it appears that one of the three leading spaces in the first example gets removed somehow, leading to the broken formatting.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

Test cases

@mcwumbly

Try quoting this:

1. one

• a

2. two

• b

@mcwumbly

And then try quoting this:

• one
  • a
• two
  • b

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

That’s the nature of numbered lists. The same thing happens in Gmail or a word processor

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

Hmm… I don’t quite follow. Google Docs doesn’t have a quote feature I’m aware of, and I don’t see this issue with copy/paste within a Google Doc.

Oh, I think you mean that “copy / paste HTML” also suffers from the same issue?

Yes, if I copy the above and past it here I do get:

Try quoting this:

1. one

• a

2. two

• b

And if I copy similar text from a Google Doc, I also get a similar (but slightly different) problem:

1. Foo

• A

2. Bar

• B

Does look like the same issue on the surface, but I don’t know enough about the implementation of quoting a post to say whether these have the same underlying cause or not though…

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

When I copy and paste a set of numbered items in Gmail and mark them as a quote and then insert text between them they reset to one for each item.

How do you propose that the problem be solved?

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

Now I feel like we’re talking about a third issue…

What I’m complaining about here is how the indentation gets broken of the nested bullets… not any renumbering.

Before quote:

After quote:

(I’ve edited the original post to include those images now)

[Arkshine]

Discourse uses MarkdownIt (which follows CommonMark spec), and the issue happens there as well:

https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/?text= >%201.%20item%20one >%20%20%20-%20sublist >%202.%20item%20two >%20%20%20-%20sublist >%20%20%20-%20sublist >%20-%20item%20one >%20-%20item%20two >%20%20%20-%20sublist >%20%20%20-%20sublist

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I think though that we can easily work around this in our quote code, given one extra space sorts it out…

@mcwumbly

Try quoting this:

1. one

• a

2. two

• b

VS:

@mcwumbly

Try quoting this:

1. one
   • a
2. two
   • b

[quote="Dave McClure, post:1, topic:266836, username:mcwumbly"]
Try quoting this:

1. one
  * a
2. two
  * b
[/quote]

VS:


[quote="Dave McClure, post:1, topic:266836, username:mcwumbly"]
Try quoting this:

1. one
   * a
2. two
   * b
[/quote]