bug: Bold text ending with colon creates massive overlapping ranges

[junhongwang418]

Description

The parser creates massive overlapping strong_emphasis ranges when bold text ends with a colon followed by more bold text in a list or new line.

Minimal Reproduction

**What's missing:**
1. **Streaming the work as it happens**
2. **Visibility of what's running**

**Possible solutions:**
1. Push notifications

Expected Behavior

Each bold section should get its own separate strong_emphasis range:

• **What's missing:** → range of ~20 characters
• **Streaming the work as it happens** → range of ~40 characters
• **Visibility of what's running** → range of ~35 characters
• **Possible solutions:** → range of ~25 characters

Actual Behavior

The parser creates massive overlapping ranges:

• Range 1: 155 characters covering **What's missing:**\n1. **Streaming the work as it happens** (incorrect)
• Range 2: 90 characters overlapping range 1 (incorrect)
• Range 3: 36 characters **Streaming the work as it happens** (correct)
• Range 4: 826 characters covering **Possible solutions:** and everything after it (incorrect)
• Range 5: 786 characters overlapping range 4 (incorrect)
• Range 6: 24 characters **Possible solutions:** (correct)

Analysis

The :** pattern at the end of bold text appears to confuse the parser's delimiter matching:

1. Parser sees **What's missing:** but doesn't close it properly
2. Continues reading through the newline and numbered list
3. Encounters the next ** and creates multiple interpretations of where the bold region ends
4. Results in overlapping strong_emphasis captures from different parse tree levels

Impact

This causes syntax highlighting to break:

• When multiple overlapping ranges are applied, the last (largest) range wins
• Large sections of text get incorrectly highlighted as bold
• Affects real-world markdown documents (we encountered this in production)

Pattern Details

The bug specifically occurs with:

• Bold text ending with punctuation (:)
• Followed by a newline
• Followed by another bold section (with or without list markers)

Works correctly:

**What's missing**
1. **Item one**

Breaks:

**What's missing:**
1. **Item one**

Testing Details

Tested with SwiftTreeSitterLayer using:

• tree-sitter-markdown parser (split_parser branch)
• markdown + markdown_inline injection
• Query: (strong_emphasis) @text.strong

Workaround

Currently filtering ranges that match both:

• Contains the :** pattern
• Length > 50 characters

This filters the incorrect large ranges while keeping legitimate bold text.

Environment

• Parser: tree-sitter-markdown (tree-sitter-grammars organization)
• Branch: split_parser
• Language: markdown + markdown_inline with injection
• Integration: SwiftTreeSitterLayer

Related

This is a known limitation mentioned in the README:

"There are inaccuracies in the output stemming from restricting markdown's complex format to tree-sitter's parsing rules"

However, this specific pattern (:** in bold text) creates particularly problematic overlapping ranges that break syntax highlighting in practice.