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Shouldn't an <enter> become a <br/>? It currently doesn't. But cool little tool, starts up faster than dreamweaver :)

In markdown, you need to precede the <enter> with two spaces to get a <br>.

As I understand it, Markdown syntax was inspired by email syntax, so we have > for block quotations, * for unordered list items, etc. By this reasoning, a single newline may just be the email client wrapping the text, whereas a double newline means the writer is starting a new paragraph.

Markdown is pretty gnarly as a language. I wrote a markdown interpreter for Erlang https://github.com/hypernumbers/erlmarkdown

Initially I wrote it against the Daring Fireball spec but switched it over to track the output of the showdown javascript library.

Markdown is not a great language to implement. I wrote a hand parser because there are loads of places where you have to look ahead more than one token (not that I am a great lexer/parser expert).

In markdown single line endings are ignored when the lines broken by them might be construed as forming a single paragraph. (It's actually one of the fiddliest bits of markdown.)

This rule is quirky -- sometimes you'll end up with (for example) bullet points merged into a paragraph through this quirk.

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