Comments to ignore links

[ehmicky]

Links can be ignored in many different ways, including with --include, --exclude and .lycheeignore. However, sometimes, it would be nice to ignore only one specific link in a given file.

A common way to do this is often to add a comment like <!-- lychee-disable-next -->, like markdown-link-check does, ESLint, and so on.

One challenge is that those comments would be file format-specific. Other tools often opt to only implement this for Markdown, but there might be some creative solutions to make this format-agnostic.

I checked the issues and I do not think this has been asked before. What are your thoughts on this?

[mre]

As you said, we would need to handle various file formats, making the tool more complex and harder to maintain.
For instance, markdown-link-check also has edge-cases like .mdx support (tcort/markdown-link-check#171) or anchor links (tcort/markdown-link-check#196).

--exclude and .lycheeignore should support that already, no? For example, instead of annotating a link in a file, why not add it to .lycheeignore?

[ehmicky]

That makes sense! Thanks for your response. 👍

[mre]

Moved to a discussion, because this is technically not an issue with lychee. Hope that's fine.

[ehmicky]

That was more of a feature request, which many repositories handle with GitHub issues.
I was following this part of CONTRIBUTING.md:

If you would like to contribute a new feature, the best way to get started is to ask for some early feedback by creating an issue yourself and asking for feedback.

Discussions work though! 👍

[mre]

Ah yeah, makes sense. It's somewhat of a balancing act sometimes. I like to move feature requests, which need some prior discussion before they can be implemented to GitHub discussions. But yeah, I do this on a case-by-case basis.

[MaienM]

One way to avoid having to understand the different file formats would be to have a start and stop marker and simply ignore everything in-between. You would then not need to care what these comments/ignored sections look like, you'd just snip out the section between the two markers before processing the file. For example:

<div>
	<a href="https://example.com/1">
	<!-- lychee-ignore-start -->
	<a href="https://example.com/2">
	<!-- lychee-ignore-end -->
	<a href="https://example.com/3">
</div>

would turn into

<div>
	<a href="https://example.com/1">
	<!--  -->
	<a href="https://example.com/3">
</div>

and

doThing(
	'https://example.com/1',
	// lychee-ignore-start
	'https://example.com/2',
	// lychee-ignore-end
	'https://example.com/3',
)

would turn into

doThing(
	'https://example.com/1',
	// 
	'https://example.com/3',
)

It's a bit more verbose than an ignore-next marker, but it avoids needing to understand what 'next' means.

Edit: I just noticed that this is essentially what was proposed in #1384, sorry for the noise, I had overlooked that one!