Is there a way to include a dashes (i.e. pairs of double-hyphens) in a Jira comment and not get strikethrough?

[Drew Clippard]

Atlassian's markup seems to interpret a commonly used grammatical construct, dashes (i.e. pairs of double-hyphens), to imply strikethrough (like this) is desired.  Dashes are a commonly used grammatical construct–to emphasize some text or provide in-line explanation–so, it's unfortunate that Atlassian syntax seems to have co-opted them...  Is this a bug in how hyphens (the strikethrough indicator) are interpreted?  Atlassian's markdown interpreter seems smart enough not to understand that a very-hyphenated-phrase is not a call for strikethrough...

[Asad Quraishi]

For those who may come back to this question in the future.

A solution to this problem is to prefix the first dash with a backslash (escape character). For example, the following text produces a strikethrough between the two dashes:

-Xloggc:/shared/[name of service]/logs/gc-%t.log

ends up looking like:

-Xloggc:/shared/[name of service]/logs/gc-%t.log

To avoid this you do the following:

\-Xloggc:/shared/[name of service]/logs/gc-%t.log

[Mor]

This works well, but:

1. If you have more than 2 dashes - it's better to escape ALL of them with \

2. After saving, if you try to edit the text the \ are removed and you will have to re-add them again :(

[Ted Zhu]

--test--

[Anoop Karollil]

You can also choose the Visual rather than Text mode for adding/editing comments. Maybe that is a new feature - I see it in v7.12.3

[Nigel Olding]

Just to note: I experienced this issue when trying to add documentation with Confluence, in particular the line: git commit -m "SJ-1234 this is a commit message" The first hyphen disappeared and the ' SJ1234 ' was shown with strike-through. My work-around was to NOT type the first hyphen until AFTER I typed the second hyphen, fwiw.

[Drew Clippard]

FWIW - I'm definitely familiar with markdown and am not looking to change markdown renderers.  Rather, I'm just curious if Jira's markdown renderer has a bug in it.

Ideally, IMHO, the markdown for strikethrough should require some form of whitespace before the beginning tag and after ending tag–both tags being hyphens in this case.

I'm just wondering why a multi-hyphenated-word doesn't have some of the middle words treated with strikethrough, yet a supporting clauses embedded in a pair of dashes within a sentence does.

Examples (of what actually gets displayed in Jira):

A multi-hyphenated-word doesn't get any strikethrough.

A sentence with a pair of dashes–to further explain something–does get strikethrough.

This feels like a bug to me.

[Jim Constant]

Hi Drew,

This happens because some of the JIRA fields support Markdown. If you know Markdown it can be useful but if you're not familiar it, then it can be very annoying.

It was first availalbe as a plug-in and that still may be how it's implemented today but I'm not sure. Either way, check with your JIRA admin because it may be possible to change how the fields are rendered.

Jim

[Nicolas Bourdages]

Yes, other renderers are possible. The admin can change which renderer is used in Field Configuration, so you can select which field uses which renderer. The JEditor plugin makes another renderer available, which gives go a more WYSIWYG experience and adds a toolbar for styles, templates and such. It can be a bit pricy if that's the only feature you use, but it's been very helpful on my server.