I'm seeing stars

Question

While composing this recent answer I ran across a funny effect of markdown rendering. I wanted to put a quote in bold and italic, and the simplest way for me is to put three asterisks before and after the quote

***"Get 'er done!"***

which renders as

"Get 'er Done!"

But I accidentally put four asterisks at the beginning, and this turned off all rendering:

****"Get 'er Done!"***

I would have expected to see

*"Get 'er Done!"

My first guess was that the markdown engine was parsing all of the special characters as one token, but my last example invalidated that.

Is this correct behavior?

Answer 1

This is by design.

a sequence of more than three underscores or more than three asterisks will no longer take part in any emphasis.

Source: balpha the Markdown wizard.