Item13119: Alpha subbullet list fails

In Foswiki 1.1.9 we have a bug in the rendering of bullets lists when two conditions are met

• Subbullet
• Alphabetical

Here are the many examples with the two that fails

• Hej
• Ho

1. Hej
2. Ho

1. Hej
2. Ho

1. Hej
2. Ho

1. Hej
2. Ho

• Bullet
  1. Alpha B. Beta FAILS

• Bullet
  1. alpha b. beta FAILS

• Bullet
  1. numbered 1
  2. numbered 2

• Bullet
  1. numbered w/o dot 1
  2. numbered w/o dot 2

The first alpha bullet is correctly seen as a sub bullet but all that follows are displayed on the same line

-- KennethLavrsen - 27 Nov 2014

I certainly agree that this is inconsistent, but I'm not 100% certain that it's a bug. In EditingShorthand in the Numbered Lists section, it states Multiple of three spaces, a type character, a dot, and another space. Several types are available besides a number: The Type characters are explicitly listed as 1, A, a, I, i, and the examples all show use of a single character.

• Bullet
  1. Alpha
  2. Beta
     1. alpha
     2. beta

works fine, provided you only use "a" and "A" to indicate the type of identifier to use.

So even though with numbers it's possible to manually increment the list, 1. 2, 3, ... using A, B, C, ... does break from the requirement that it is "3 spaces and a type character". It's probably not good practice to manually increment the letters in the wikitext, as it would be confusing if users then go back and insert items in the list.

Anyway, the regex in question is Render.pm line 448 (in master aka trunk)

elsif ( $line =~ m/^((\t|   )+)([1AaIi]\.|\d+\.?) ?/ ) {

Another issue of allowing any letter, is that following your example, A, B, C ... G, H, I! is a problem. Is the I a roman numeral list entry, or a continuation of the alpha list. I think we risk making the rendering much more complex if we need to also track list context, and allow any alpha, possibly overlapping / conflicting with roman numerals.

The more I ponder this, I think it's working as intended and documented.

-- GeorgeClark - 28 Nov 2014

Actually this fails even for the 1st level. Above you used A and a for both bullets. Here it is failing.

1. Hej B. Ho

1. Hej b. Ho

I'd like to set this task to "No action" if it's okay with you.

-- GeorgeClark - 29 Nov 2014

Kenneth, Setting this to Proposal required.

-- GeorgeClark - 23 Dec 2014

This is also a duplicate of Item1115 Clarified documentation under Item1115. Please close this task if documentation is sufficient fix.

-- GeorgeClark - 29 Dec 2014

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