266272 - Improving automatic highlight features.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Julien ÉLIE]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Build Identifier: 

The automatic highlight with « /word/ », « _word_ », « *word* » is a very 
great idea !
However, could it be improved ?
Because it happens that it highlights words which shouldn't be.
For instance :

1/b = (p-q)/p therefore b = p/(p-q).

there is a highlight of « p therefore b = p »...
Such mistakes can also be found with « _ » or « * ».

Is it possible to handle the bad cases with regular expressions, preventing 
the automatic highlight from mistaking ?

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Probably a dupe of one of the dependencies of bug 116842, but I can't find which
one. It's quite tricky, because some people actually want this behaviour (set an
entire string in bold, italic or underline).

Comment 2

[Julien ÉLIE]

I think it is bug 128138.

It is good for a whole string but, as in the example given, it is awkward.

Comment 3

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Please give real world, common examples of failure and propose a concrete
solution  (which doesn't make things worse in other cases) before filing a bug.
It's a heuristic, and it is known to fail in edge cases.