Is it possible to disable autolinking in remark-gfm?

[Trott]

Is it possible to use remark-gfm but disable autolinking?

What I'm seeing

I want to use GFM, but mostly for tables and maybe strikethrough. I don't mind checkboxes one way or the other. Autolinking would be fine, but I find that it links a lot of things that I don't intend to be links (and that GitHub doesn't link either--so maybe this is a bug?).

So, if I have a GFM table with the columns not aligned, remark-gfm aligns them if I parse and then stringify. Great.

But if I have something like this:

* [email protected]

Here's how GitHub renders it:

• [email protected]

(Specifically, it does not turn the text into a link.)

But if I parse and stringify that text with remark-gfm....

echo '* [email protected]' | remark -u remark-gfm 
*   <[email protected]>
<stdin>: no issues found

It surrounds it in < and >, making it a link.

It's possible I'm misunderstanding parse and stringify. I'm hoping to use remark-gfm to basically format my markdown consistently by parsing it and stringifying it. But this behavior kind of makes it a non-starter for changelog files with hundreds of strings in that format.

So options I've considered:

• Find a way to use remark-gfm but disable autolinking, or at least autolinking of email addresses. (That's what I'm asking about in this question.)
• Open an issue and/or dive in and see if I can fix the issue myself. Trying to reverse engineer GitHub's rendering into a parser algorithm or regular expression is not my idea of a good time, but maybe someone else would be psyched to do it.
• Open an issue and/or implement a feature to disable autolinking via an option in remark-gfm if that option doesn't already exist.
• Copy over remark-gfm and remove the autolinking myself. (I've done this as a proof of concept, but I would prefer not to maintain my own fork of remark-gfm.)

Thanks for taking the time to read and for providing this robust ecosystem for people like me to use for free. ❤️

[Trott]

I'm not sure if it's the right/complete solution, but syntax-tree/mdast-util-gfm-autolink-literal#5 seems to fix this issue and doesn't break any existing tests, so hopefully it's on the right track at least?

[wooorm]

Is it possible to use remark-gfm but disable autolinking?

You could do what remark-gfm does — add micromark and mdast-util-{to,from} extensions/utilities — but without micromark-extension-gfm-autolink-literal and mdast-util-gfm-autolink-literal.

but I find that it links a lot of things that I don't intend to be links (and that GitHub doesn't link either--so maybe this is a bug?)

These are indeed bugs! I’ve spent a lot of time trying to reverse engineer what GitHub does. But it’s hard because it’s not specified and because they use different algorithms in different places.
I’d appreciate hearing about all the cases where our algorithm doesn’t match theirs.

I'm hoping to use remark-gfm to basically format my markdown consistently by parsing it and stringifying it. But this behavior kind of makes it a non-starter for changelog files with hundreds of strings in that format.

Yep, that’s what it’s supposed to do. And indeed a bug.

Open an issue and/or dive in and see if I can fix the issue myself. Trying to reverse engineer GitHub's rendering into a parser algorithm or regular expression is not my idea of a good time, but maybe someone else would be psyched to do it.

I want to do this!

[wooorm]

Solved the bug in syntax-tree/mdast-util-gfm-autolink-literal@7555d45. Thanks @Trott for the detailed info, the hint for a fix, and the kind words! 🤗