And it makes the rare-but-still-occasionally-desired case doable without escaping into HTML (which is not possible in LW’s no-HTML subset of Markdown).
You’d only need, whenever you see an underscore, to check whether the previous character is whitespace (or punctuation, e.g. a left parenthesis). Arundelo’s point seems more valid to me (though you might allow to escape spaces, e.g. _n_\ th… but that’d be more complicated).
It’s probably less work to read character-by-character than to split on words and read the first and last character of each.
And it makes the rare-but-still-occasionally-desired case doable without escaping into HTML (which is not possible in LW’s no-HTML subset of Markdown).
You’d only need, whenever you see an underscore, to check whether the previous character is whitespace (or punctuation, e.g. a left parenthesis). Arundelo’s point seems more valid to me (though you might allow to escape spaces, e.g.
_n_\ th… but that’d be more complicated).True! I do not know why MarkDown italics works within words.