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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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When your markdown README files on GitHub are broken as of lately

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/18

Basically below gist tells it all.

Many repositories on GitHub do not have whitespace between the # and headings. This is against the specs, so GitHub fixed their rendering engine. Which means now many files do not render nicely any more.

So if you have headings like this:

##text

Fix them to be like:

## text

If your GitHub repository has less than 50 starts, you did not get an automatic pull request to fix it from https://github.com/bryant1410/readmesfix so you can either:

–jeroen

Recently, GitHub introduced the change in how atx
headers are parsed in Markdown files.

##Wrong

Correct

While this change follows the spec, it breaks many existing repositories. I took the
README dataset which we created
at source{d} and ran a simple
regexp PySpark job.
It appeared that more than 500,000 repositories have README files which are rendered
with invalid headers.

Among those 0.5mm, there are more than 10,000 which have more than 50 stars. They were
uploaded to data.world.

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