It seems like the OP would be better served by CommonMark or any of the alternate implementations which are designed to be more feature complete to solve these kinds of formatting problems.
Regardless, if you want to go down the rat hole of exactly what is Markdown, the only "correct" answer is 'whatever Gruber's 'markdown.pl' does, warts and all'.
It seems like the OP would be better served by CommonMark or any of the alternate implementations which are designed to be more feature complete to solve these kinds of formatting problems.
Regardless, if you want to go down the rat hole of exactly what is Markdown, the only "correct" answer is 'whatever Gruber's 'markdown.pl' does, warts and all'.