Parsing Inconsistencies for Multi-Block Footnote Bodies

[rdestefa]

Not sure if this should be considered a "bug" since the GFM spec doesn't have a section on footnotes, and their documentation doesn't seem quite accurate either, but given that it seems like this repo aims to achieve similar behavior to GitHub I'm marking it as a bug for now. Feel free to change.

When writing a footnote body, you can include multiple paragraphs by indenting subsequent paragraphs by 4 spaces relatively, so doing this produces ¹

[^1]: First paragraph

    Second paragraph

This kind of works for commonmark-java, except that you need to include 4 spaces in all blank lines (I'm using the GLFM dingus since the regular CommonMark dingus doesn't support this feature):

This works

GLFM Example

[^1]: First paragraph
••••
    Second paragraph

<section class="footnotes" data-footnotes>
<ol>
<li id="fn-1">
<p>
First paragraph</p>
<p>
Second paragraph <a href="#fnref-1" class="footnote-backref" data-footnote-backref data-footnote-backref-idx="1" aria-label="Back to reference 1">
↩</a>
</p>
</li>
</ol>
</section>

This doesn't

GLFM Example

[^1]: First paragraph

    Second paragraph

<pre><code>Second paragraph
</code>
</pre>
<section class="footnotes" data-footnotes>
<ol>
<li id="fn-1">
<p>
First paragraph <a href="#fnref-1" class="footnote-backref" data-footnote-backref data-footnote-backref-idx="1" aria-label="Back to reference 1">
↩</a>
</p>
</li>
</ol>
</section>

This doesn't

GLFM Example (This one has weird behavior there too)

[^1]: First paragraph
••
    Second paragraph

<pre><code>Second paragraph
</code>
</pre>
<section class="footnotes" data-footnotes>
<ol>
<li id="fn-1">
<p>
First paragraph <a href="#fnref-1" class="footnote-backref" data-footnote-backref data-footnote-backref-idx="1" aria-label="Back to reference 1">
↩</a>
</p>
</li>
</ol>
</section>

This doesn't

GLFM Example

[^1]: First paragraph
••••

    Second paragraph

<pre><code>Second paragraph
</code>
</pre>
<section class="footnotes" data-footnotes>
<ol>
<li id="fn-1">
<p>
First paragraph <a href="#fnref-1" class="footnote-backref" data-footnote-backref data-footnote-backref-idx="1" aria-label="Back to reference 1">
↩</a>
</p>
</li>
</ol>
</section>

Here's a more complex example.

Footnotes

1. First paragraph

   Second paragraph ↩

[robinst]

Hmm yeah, thanks for raising this. This looks like different handling of lazy continuation lines/closing of blocks. Will need to compare the logic of continuing/closing blocks here: https://github.com/github/cmark-gfm/blob/master/src/blocks.c#L1493

[robinst]

Fix released in 0.25.1: https://github.com/commonmark/commonmark-java/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md#0251---2025-08-01

CC @c0d1f1ed and @zampino