What causes "${pagePath} renders literal markdown emphasis in " in koala73/worldmonitor?

Run the brief content through the publish-time markdown-emphasis stripping helper before rendering

koala73/worldmonitor · error · Error

${pagePath} renders literal markdown emphasis in <main>

Error message

${pagePath} renders literal markdown emphasis in <main>

What it means

assertCountryBriefPresentation validates the published page: it extracts the <main> HTML and throws if it contains the literal sequence '**', meaning markdown emphasis was not converted or stripped before publishing. Publish rules require markdown emphasis to be stripped, so raw '**' in <main> indicates a leaky render pipeline that would show raw markdown syntax to readers and crawlers.

Solutions

Run the brief content through the publish-time markdown-emphasis stripping helper before rendering
Locate the '**' occurrence in the page content and remove or properly convert it in the source data
Render the field through the same formatter used for validated brief fields instead of raw interpolation
If '**' is intentional content, rephrase or escape it to avoid the forbidden sequence

Example fix

// before
<main><p>${brief.text}</p></main>          // renders "**critical**"
// after
<main><p>${stripMarkdownEmphasis(brief.text)}</p></main>  // renders "critical"

Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

const main = corpusMainHtml(html);
if (main.includes('**')) {
  throw new Error(`${pagePath}: literal markdown emphasis leaked into <main>`);
}

Try / catch

try {
  assertCountryBriefPresentation({ pagePath, html, sources });
} catch (err) {
  if (err.message.includes('literal markdown emphasis')) {
    console.error(`Raw markdown rendered for ${pagePath}; route content through stripMarkdownEmphasis()`);
  }
  throw err;
}

Prevention

Route every brief field through the shared emphasis-stripping/formatter helper; never interpolate raw model output
Strip markdown emphasis at content-freeze time so unformatted text cannot enter the pipeline later
Lint generated content for '**' and other markdown syntax before rendering
If content legitimately needs '**', escape or rephrase it at authoring time

When it happens

Trigger: Running assertCountryBriefPresentation({ pagePath, html, sources }) on HTML whose <main> contains '**'. Typically a brief text with markdown bold/italic passed through without the emphasis-stripping step, or a data string containing '**' interpolated as plain text.

Common situations: Brief content generated by a model containing markdown emphasis that bypassed the strip/render step; a new field rendered into the page without going through the shared emphasis-stripping helper; a legitimate '**' in the content (e.g. exponentiation or wildcard text).

Understand the failure class

Background: "Invalid ... format", "must be in format X", "does not look like a ..." — invalid argument format errors across CLI tools and libraries — this error's family across 17 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of koala73/worldmonitor@7d06c8633d (2026-09-15). Data as JSON: /api/errors/974f0ef841529477. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at scripts/build-crawlable-corpus.mjs:3572

function corpusVisibleText(html) {
  return corpusMainHtml(html).replace(/<[^>]+>/g, ' ').replace(/\s+/g, ' ').trim();
}

function intelBriefHtml(html) {
  const match = corpusMainHtml(html).match(/<div\b[^>]*\bdata-intel-brief\b[^>]*>([\s\S]*?)<\/div>/i);
  return match ? match[1] : null;
}

// #7738: prerendered country briefs were injected as escaped markdown, so
// crawlers saw literal `**` and `WHAT THIS MEANS FOR NO`. Fail the build
// when either artifact reaches <main>, including section titles that are
// still plain text rather than <h*> tags.
const MEANS_FOR_ISO_RE = /^\s*what this means for [a-z]{2}(?=\s*(?::|$))/im;

export function assertCountryBriefPresentation({ pagePath, html, sources }) {
  const main = corpusMainHtml(html);
  if (main.includes('**')) {
    throw new Error(`${pagePath} renders literal markdown emphasis in <main>`);
  }
  const brief = intelBriefHtml(html);
  if (brief && sources !== undefined) {
    // Check the rendered claim blocks as well as the input. A later formatter
    // must not add an entity or change a citation after publish-time validation.
    const claims = [...brief.matchAll(/<(p|li)\b([^>]*)>([\s\S]*?)<\/\1>/gi)]
      .filter((match) => !/\bclass="source"/.test(match[2]))
      .map((match) => corpusVisibleText(match[3]).replace(/&(amp|lt|gt|quot|#39);/g,
        (entity) => ({ '&amp;': '&', '&lt;': '<', '&gt;': '>', '&quot;': '"', '&#39;': "'" })[entity]));
    const gap = briefCitationGroundingGap({ text: claims.join('\n'), sources });
    if (gap) throw new Error(`${pagePath} brief has unsupported citation: ${gap}`);
  }
  const headingSource = brief ?? main;
  const headingHits = [...headingSource.matchAll(/<h[1-6]\b[^>]*>([\s\S]*?)<\/h[1-6]>/gi)];
  for (const hit of headingHits) {
    const text = hit[1].replace(/<[^>]+>/g, ' ').replace(/\s+/g, ' ').trim();
    if (MEANS_FOR_ISO_RE.test(text)) {
      throw new Error(`${pagePath} heading leaks ISO code: ${text}`);

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