first or last letter dropped for links with open arrows

[dennisl68-castra]

The diagram below doesn't produce my intended graph.

flowchart LR
    dev---ops

See live editor

The behaviour ought to be the same as when using

flowchart LR
    dev --- ops

or

flowchart LR
    Dev---Ops

This issue is by design and I don't see an easy way to fix it except breaking the current syntax of --o-arrows or ----no-arrows links.

The same goes for

flowchart LR
    dev---xerxes

[xurizaemon]

TIL that it's possible to omit the spaces bounding arrows!

I see that the docs for "o" and "x" head arrows use spaces to bound the arrows. There are a few docs examples without spaces.

As you note, bounding the arrows by spaces seems to better assist the parser in identifying the correct layout.

Is there a specific use case you have that makes non-spaced arrows of benefit? If there is a trade-off in parser complexity (or effort) versus syntax, another solution here might be clarifying docs to recommend spaces.

[dennisl68-castra]

No use case other then it's somewhat confusing.

[jgreywolf]

FYI - In doing some work on visual editor for Mermaid Chart last week, I noticed that this happens to an edge label if an "o" or an "x" is at the end of the text as well. We will be prioritizing this accordingly

[jgreywolf]

For now please follow the workaround of including spaces around the edge/arrow definitions in order to help the parser understand the difference between arrows. I am continuing to work on this to see if there is a better way, but so far nothing brilliant has occurred.

I will also look at updating the documentation