Is there any way to turn off text surrounded by underscore from displaying as italics

[Elly Clein]

SQL table/column names when I am writing tests are becoming corrupted due to all the underscores. It is not feasible to add an escaping "/" into them all as I am copy/pasting selects from SQL.

Is there no way to turn off these settings? Similar to putting hyphens around text that causes them to strikethrough. It should not be automatic. It severely cripples functionality. I want the tester to be able to copy and paste the SQL back out of Jira but it has characters missing when displayed.

[Daniel Eads]

Hi @Elly Clein , welcome to the Community!

It's possible to change the renderer for fields like Description to the "Default renderer", which doesn't parse underscores as markdown. However, this only affects the old issue view in Jira - and by default you're likely looking at the issue using the new issue view. Going back to the old issue view is primarily done per-user, so I wouldn't suggest this as the best course of action going forward.

Instead, I'll suggest using the code block to paste into, as this should retain any special characters. In the example here, you can see I've pasted the same text both in and out of the code block:

There are two ways to generate the code block:

1. The formatting toolbar at the top can be used to create the code block
2. You can use backticks (```) while typing to create the code block. This works with pastes too - if the paste you're making is surrounded by three ``` characters at the beginning / end, the whole thing will paste into a code block in Jira.

You can also use code formatting in-line by using single backticks around the item, which might be helpful if you're just mentioning table names. For example, writing this in Jira:

I can reference `MUCH_DATA` while typing. I can also say `ANOTHER_TABLE` without italics.

renders in-line code formatting for the tables:

Hopefully that helps makes the SQL easier to type!

Cheers,
Daniel  

[Elly Clein]

Thanks for your reply. That's a good tip for when I'm writing in Description field but it doesn't seem to work when I'm writing in Test Step, Test Data or Results fields. Those fields are still corrupting the code.

[Daniel Eads]

Hey @Elly Clein ,

Giving Zephyr a try, I can see the test fields use the Wiki Renderer but don't support the code block. Unfortunately this makes things slightly more difficult! You can get underscores in those fields, but each of them have to be escaped individually with a \ character:

The table MUCH\_DATA contains new rows from ANOTHER\_TABLE like \*all\*

This renders out to:

If you're using a SQL tool like DataGrip, it might be possible to get an export format created that includes the escape characters. On the other hand if you're manually typing in this field, having to escape each character like this is going to be somewhat of a hassle. Not impossible, but also not convenient.

[David Allen]

As a developer, I find myself frequently typing text that includes multiple underscores and rarely wanting to use italics.  Constantly needing to undo unwanted changes is very annoying. Yes, they can be undone by Ctrl-Z if typed immediately, but that is difficult if typing very quickly or looking at the keyboard to type (which seems to cover most users).

It would be very helpful to be able to turn this off without resorting to code blocks or disabling all keyboard formatting.

[Elly Clein]

I agree - I also paste code from SQL so it's just not feasible to manually go through and add blocks. I guess you could write an excel formula to add them in but it's not ideal.

It doesn't sound like there is an alternative solution though.

It would be far better to be able to be able to switch it off. I don't think I would ever use that functionality so if it is left on, it's just a constant battle to correct everything. If I wanted italics, I would us Ctrl+I, it wouldn't even occur to me to add underscores.

[Danny]

I had an issue with this recently which I solved by finding and replacing underscores with _ programmatically.

The HTML entity resolved correctly to an underscore in Confluence and did not italicise my content.

Just putting this here in case it would maybe help someone in the future.