Misinterpreted symbols in templates - MediaWiki-l

23 Jun 2015

I have some text on a page that looks like this:

a{{Delim}}b

If Template:Delim looks like this:

<onlyinclude>,</onlyinclude>

Then I get

a,b

But if Template:Delim looks like this:

<onlyinclude>:</onlyinclude>

Then I get

a
   b

The ':' symbol is being interpreted as if it appeared at the beginning of a line,
even though it does not.

The '*', '#' and ';' symbols also have this effect -- interpreted
as markup rather than punctuation.  On the other hand, the '|' symbol does not --
if I put "a{{Delim}}b" inside of a table, it will correctly produce
"a|b" in the table cell.

Is this a bug?  I've always interpreted "the start of the line" to mean
"preceded by a newline" in the fully-expanded source, but maybe text appearing
at the start of a template is supposed to get special treatment?

Workaround: add <nowiki/> to the start of Template:Delim.

Version: MediaWiki 1.24.2, PHP 5.5.20; various extensions including Semantic MediaWiki and
Gadgets

—Dan