asterisk character disappears when pasting text even when in code formatted text

Question

When I paste text that contains an asterisk, such as the the example below, in either a normal text area, or into a section of text formatted as code, the asterisk disappears. Nothing happens to make me think it treats it as markdown, and clearly this should not happen in code formatted text. It does paste correctly in a code block such as the one below.

sed -E 's/(somestring.*otherstring)blah( .*$)/\1replacemiddle\2/' somefile

I don't know if this affects other characters. I have tested this in three cloud products: Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence. I have been unable to find a bug report for this, but I doubt I'm unique in having this happen.

Are any of you aware of a ticket regarding this, or any relevant information? I would need someone else in my company to raise a ticket, so only want to do that if this is not already known and being addressed.

Service management comment, Confluence page, and Software comment screenshots:

Dave · Answer

Same problem here. I'm trying to paste the path to some metrics data which contains some asterisks. It is a fairly long string that I'm trying to embed in a cell in a table. I'd like the text to wrap. If I use the suggested workaround of a code snippet I get a horizontal scrollbar in my table.

Would be nice if Confluence offered a paste as plain text option to handle this.

Sean Cosgrove · Answer

Hi Andy,

Thanks - I should have noticed the italicized normal text. I don't think that code formatted text should have markdown applied, and it doesn't get italicized there. Seems like a bug to me.

I use code snippets often, but code formatted text inline is helpful in certain cases. Not being sure that the code will appear as written is not good.

Thanks,
Sean

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Hi Sean,

Thanks for posting all this information.  The specific string and the screenshots help a lot to understand what is happening here.  Your example string here has exactly two asterisks within it.  Because this character is used within our markdown, it appears this is being interpreted as your desire to italicize the text in between those characters.

Since this is code, and code shouldn't be formatted or mistaken for markdown, I would always recommend using the code snippet feature to store this information.  You can quickly create one of these with three accent marks in the editor ``` or by clicking the icon that looks like <> in the toolbar of the editor.

The code snippet is designed to never try to format the content within it.  You can then paste that code within the code snippet.

I tried to see if there was a bug ticket for this specific behavior, but so far I have not found one for this yet.  However given the way our markdown works, this action might not be considered a bug.

I hope that helps.

Andy