rust-lang / rust-lang/rustfmt

Trailing space line breaks are removed from doc comments

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#5,639 5 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Rust
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Description

Consider this:

/*!
This  
has  
breaks.
*/

Note the two trailing spaces at each of lines 2 and 3. These are line breaks according to the Markdown specification. Unfortunately, rustfmt treats them as an accident and removes them.

The alternative markup here is <br/>, which is HTML-specific and harder to read, but won't be eaten by rustfmt.

I would recommend allowing exactly two spaces at the end of a line in doc comments, under the assumption that this is intended.

Contributor guide

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating rustfmt's doc-comment formatting logic and existing tests for trailing whitespace. Reproduce the Markdown example, then verify that exactly two trailing spaces are preserved while unrelated formatting remains unchanged.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
documentation, tooling
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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