autolink plus superscript interact weirdly about comrak HOT 2 CLOSED

This is awkward, yeah :( I'm a bit of a fan of the autolinker as it stands since its implementation is so straightforward, being separated out entirely from the reasonably ugly inline parser. (of course, this also makes it easiest to conform with the GFM autolinking examples, since it works the same way there. Trying to reproduce the same results via an algorithm that was integrated with the inline parser might be difficult.)

I don't think it's the worst to ask users to e.g. use <https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x^2+(y-(x^2)^(1/3))^2=1> in this case, though the result it does give as-is is quite ugly.

from comrak.

It's a bit hard to recall exactly what I was thinking here, but I suspect the wording of the GFM spec suggests the OP's example should parse as a link (and old-Reddit of course does).

I agree that architecturally having the autolinker separate from parsing is much desirable to intertwining the logic with parsing, changing both comrak and upstream cmark to handle these cases would be quite hard, that it's probably best to just leave as-is, maybe word the spec more precisely and add more test cases like in the OP if it even comes down to it.

Edit: oh, GFM spec doesn't even define superscript, so it's hard to say anything about the spec, though it's reasonable to assume that extensions are additive and don't break other features. I'm not sure offhand if any other characters break URLs like ^.

from comrak.