MDS052: no-space-in-code-spans

Inline code spans with leading or trailing whitespace inside the backticks are almost always typos; flag them.

CommonMark strips one space from each side of a code span when the content starts and ends with a space and is not entirely whitespace (` x ` → x, ` x ` → ` x`). Whitespace that remains after this normalisation — a double space on one side, a tab, or a space on only one side — renders verbatim. Newlines inside code spans are normalised to spaces by CommonMark, so a leading or trailing newline renders as a leading or trailing space. This rule flags all of those cases.

# Settings

This rule has no tunable settings. Enable or disable it as a unit.

# Config

Enable:

rules:
  no-space-in-code-spans: true

Disable:

rules:
  no-space-in-code-spans: false

# Examples

# Bad – leading space

# Leading Space

Use ` x` here.

# Bad – trailing space

# Trailing Space

Use `x ` here.

# Bad – double space on both sides

# Double Space Both Sides

Use `  x  ` here.

# Good – no visible boundary whitespace

# Clean Code Spans

Use `x` for the value.

Use ` x ` — CommonMark's single-space trim strips both outer spaces.

Use `foo bar` for multi-word.

# Diagnostics

# Meta-Information

• ID: MDS052
• Name: no-space-in-code-spans
• Status: ready
• Default: disabled, opt-in
• Fixable: yes (trims whitespace; spans that are empty after trimming or whose trimmed content starts/ends with a backtick adjacent to a delimiter are left unchanged or have a single protective space preserved)
• Implementation: source
• Category: whitespace
• markdownlint: MD038 (no-space-in-code)
• rumdl: MD038 (no-space-in-code)
• mado: MD038 (no-space-in-code)